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The 'Story of Shell'

This short narrative aims to capture the key development steps in the project. For a concise listing of the project deliverables, see the Project Outputs page.  These outputs are also referenced in the text here for convenience.  Before reading this, we suggest you start by watching the SHELL Project Video, or reading the Shell Project Briefing Paper v3.

The SHELL project commenced in March 2002, with aims to:

• Improve administration through single registration for all partnership students, combined with rapid transfer of registration data between institutions.  (This aimed to cut administrative workloads and improve the co-ordination between delivery and awarding institutions.)
   

• Improve frameworks for integrating the student record and information systems between partnership colleges and the University.  (In practical terms, from the learner point of view, this aimed to cut the waiting time from the point of initial registration to where access to the VLE was granted.)
   

• Develop a personal web-based portal for learners. (This aimed to provide an independent record of qualifications that would be available to learners long after they left their place of study.)

Work was conducted by four teams - encompassing technical development, learner records (by a group named the standards team), business processes & implementation, and evaluation & dissemination.

The Standards team, led by David Croot, were charged with the development of the learner records. The approach to learner records was originally specified in terms of a transcript (formal record of qualifications) and personal development planning (spanning a rather wider range of recordable events, experiences, skills or capabilities). 

In June 2002, the Standards team met to agree the underlying philosophy and broad structure of the transcript. The specification was considered by the University Quality and Standards Committee, who recommended changing the terminology to that of a 'record of achievement' in view of the legal status of the existing University transcript, indicating that the learner record would at best sit in parallel with existing records.

See the User Specification for the Learner Record (v1.6) (DOC, 640Kb)

The development of the necessary agreements between partners was completed by the Business Analysis and Implementation team, headed up by Maureen Leslie.

The production of the redesigned business processes document involved extensive consultations with the Standards and Technical teams within the project, project partners and external sources including CETIS, JISC, Vendors and external consultants. By September 2002 a final draft setting out the procedures for transacting data between partners was circulated for approval.

See the Re-Designed Business Processes Phase 1 (v1.7) (DOC, 680Kb)

Ongoing work in the Standards team in respect of the learner records led to further changes in the business processes documentation.  In January 2003, a draft Business Process Implementation Plan was produced, which included an individual action based document for each partner in the consortium.  By now, the Memorandum of Agreement between the consortium members had been signed, with changes made to student registration forms to achieve compliance with the Data Protection Act.

In March 2003, a series of 'use cases' (specifications of tests conducted from a users perspective) were developed, and used to 'walk through' the business processes at each partner institution.  At that same time, the project entered into agreements with a software company (Phosphorix) who had been providing technical support to the project after the earlier loss of the technical team leader to another post.

In late Spring 2003, visits were taking place at 11 institutions interested in forming part of phase 2 of the project, where the core partnership of 5 was to expand. A number of schools expressed an interest in joining phase 2, and this extension was endorsed by the Project Board and JISC.

See the Re-Designed Business Processes Phase 2 (v1) (DOC, 440Kb)

After completion of the learner record and redesigned business processes specifications, work turned to the development of technical specifications for the supporting SHELL infrastructure (the database, portal and hub) and the transactions required for communication to and from the hub.

Unfortunately, there was a lack of agreement with various suppliers regarding the open source use of their code, and this, together with earlier delays caused by the difficulties in securing a replacement team leader was to cause delays in implementation.

Phosphorix proposed the development of an interface agent (ioAgent) to act as the means of communication between student record systems and the SHELL hub. By mid 2003, the funding for the purchase of ioAgents was agreed, with all bar one of the partners proposing to use this route.  (One partner wished to develop their own interface to the hub).  Phosphorix, in co-operation with ETL Solutions undertook the development of this interface agent, producing a specification for message exchange. Phosphorix suggested the use of a native open source database called Xindice for the development of the learner record database. 

See the Specification of message exchange with ioNode v1.3 (DOC, 370Kb)

Each ioAgent required a 'plug-in' to interface to the particular record system in use by the project partner. Capita provided Phosphorix with an API for Unit-e, but stated that they did not plan to develop a plug-in for HEMIS.  At that time, the University Registry were considering Unit-e as a replacement for HEMIS.  Although HEMIS was not scheduled for replacement until after the end date for SHELL, there was an expectation that SHELL would be the vehicle to deliver partnership data to HEMIS.  Furthermore, despite earlier expressions of interest, other suppliers declined to provide plug-ins for systems used in partner colleges, leaving this development to be borne by the project.

Meanwhile, as extension work, the project also developed and made available a 'test bed' allowing people to use the system to test transfers using CSV or XML data formats.  An administration portal was developed in order to manage both live and test transfers.

See the Administration Portal Specification v0.2 (PDF 23Kb)

The standards team were also working to develop the wider aspects of the learner records. Early in 2003, with work on the learner record specification now complete, the focus then shifted towards designing a specification of a multi-institutional personal development record (PDR).  It was decided to split this work into two parts, effectively dividing the PDR into a) a record of skills and competencies, and b) a record addressing the personal reflective elements of the PDR. In May 2003, the team decided to adopt the Skills and Competencies framework of the DfES/QCA.  However, it became quickly apparent that very little information on skills and competencies was currently recorded electronically, and this was to provide a significant hurdle to the project.

A range of IT based approaches to recording these skills and competencies were considered by the standards team during the Summer of 2003, with a view to developing a learner record portal.  As part of developing this portal, a qualitative research brief was developed and used as the basis for a series of focus groups held across the consortium, sampling views from participants at school to postgraduates.  The results of this study were fed back to the project team to inform the development of the portal, and the findings formed the basis of a conference publication titled: Personalised records of lifelong learning in the UK: What do our learners want?

The development of the learner record portal was contracted to ICO³, who worked in conjunction with Phosphorix to develop an interface to the learner records database. The delays in technical development meant that the portal was developed later in the project than originally intended.  Furthermore, difficulties in obtaining agreement across the project consortium in respect of the PDR meant that the learner record portal was limited to providing records of achievement at this stage. Very few PDP systems were in use within the consortium at that time, with the project partners taking a relatively diverse view of data.   

See the Learner Record Portal Specification (v0.31) (PDF 42Kb)

In spite of these problems, the learner record portal was completed in early 2005. With links to the administration portal and databases in place, student data could now be transferred between institutions and managed using the administration tool.

To see the learner record portal in action, take a look at the SHELL Project Video (Windows Media, 15Mb). Screenshots are also available on this website, showing you user views of:

• registration for access to the learner record portal (JPG 170Kb)

• a summary of their records (JPG 170Kb)

• the facility to print or download selected records from the portal (JPG 100Kb)

At the end of the project, a review paper was published in the Computers and Advanced Technologies in Education conference, titled Bridging the divide: developing interoperable learner record systems.  This summarises the approaches taken by the project, describing the benefits and problems encountered.  (For more detailed interim and final evaluation reports, see the Evaluation Reports pages.)

Project Website managed by Jon Yorke