The area of working with partners both within sector (HE-HE and FE-FE) on a regional basis and
between sectors (FE-HE) is an issue of growing importance, this will increasingly mean that the
systems of these institutions will need to work together. We are already seeing courses jointly
provided between HEIs and FECs and where this involves the use of VLEs (as it increasingly will)
there is a need for the systems at all the partners to communicate with the chosen VLE (or more
likely VLEs). Further, to support progression and cross charging there will be a need for a variety
of systems to work together.
It will be very difficult to add this in later, if it is not considered when choosing the technology, and
strongly suggests the need to use open standards, unless all the partners agree on some other
approach.
The standards will be needed at a variety of different levels:
-
Transport mechanisms for exchanging data (such as SOAP)
-
Data formats (such as XML specifications from IMS)
-
Semantic (what data will be transferred)
An approach which might be considered is the use of web services which are specifically designed
as a standards based approach to creating shared applications.
Unfortunately, the use of standards by itself is not sufficient for a variety of reasons.
