A higher education sector effort to align data standards across institutions and global borders will take a step forward on Thursday with the addition of Australia’s largest enterprise software company TechnologyOne.
The Australian company, which provides back-end software to Australian universities and TAFEs, has signed on as a founding member of the sector’s MortarCAPS Higher Learning Data Standard (MCDS).
MCDS is a new data framework being developed by the technology leaders of higher education and research institutions to improve interoperability of systems like CRMs, student management platforms and government portals.
For the first time, the data standardisation effort is being sector-led, rather than by vendors. The hope is that this will encourage genuine collaborations, with the sector able to harmonise their systems and even influence the design of software products.
It also aligns with a government push to boost productivity through post secondary education and digital technologies, and could help operationalise promised reforms like a national skills passport and greater support for nursing, midwifery, teaching and social work students on placement.
But the federal government is yet to endorse the plan and TechOne is the first major industry mover.
“The post secondary education environment is very siloed, very fractured, and there’s no harmonisation across the ecosystem,” MortarCAPS chief executive Charlsey Pearce said.
“So it makes everything more challenging, whether it’s government reporting or students moving between institutions or even within institutions.”
Stakeholders from the sector, including the Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology, are participating in workshops to agree on the new data standards, which are then built into a JSON Schema.
Vendors pay to access the standards, with the fee based on their organisation size in a bid to encourage smaller innovative companies to be involved. Founding member vendors like TechnologyOne can also participate in the working groups, but latecomers miss out on the opportunity to influence development.
Ms Pearce said discussions are live with all the sector’s other major vendors.
Similar interoperability efforts in other countries have typically been vendor led, she said, but MortarCAPS comes straight from the post-secondary sector.
“For the very first time, we’re actually able to influence the product development roadmaps of the vendors that we engage with,” Ms Pearce told InnovationAus.com. “So the sector gets to sit there and say, ‘This is what we need now build to it.’”
“That should enable us to get benefits more quickly realised. We don’t have the five years to do things that we used to have.”
Dozens of individual institutions from Australia are participating, while Canada has also made it a part of its upcoming curriculum management changes. The UK has also expressed an interest.
A major update to the first standard will be rolled out in June for curriculum design and practical placements, with more to follow in quarterly release cycles for other post secondary systems including research.
MortarCaps is still seeking support and endorsement for the sector’s effort from federal education ministry and the Jobs and Skills Commissioner,
“The sector has been long accused of being antiquated and not having the productivity at the core and all of these sorts of things,” Ms Pearce said. “And this is it driving forward innovation and trying to modernise itself.”
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.