Why so complex?

[maathieu]

Many smaller institutions do not have a digital course catalogue system to which they could add an API component.

As far as my situation is here, we use Excel and paper, and there is just 1 person (me...) managing all the IT infrastructure...

Since course catalogues do not change on a regular basis, why having not implemented a simpler solution, akin to RSS, for example?

The institution would set and update a course catalog in a specific format at a specific URL (for example https://myuniversity.eu/ewpcoursecatalog.csv ), give that URL to the dashboard (the dashboard would validate the contents and make sure syntax is correct, or otherwise throw an error); then the OLA could ping that URL to fetch the course list on a regular basis.

For a situation like mine, I would go ask the secretary to give me the updated course catalog, upload it to our website, and we would be done...

[tiagosimoes-euf]

Hi Mathieu,

We don’t see how the proposed solution could support the requirements for handling course catalogue information for a medium/large university. And while a small course catalogue will have relatively few changes year on year the situation changes quite quickly as the volume of data increases, which calls for a technical solution able to properly handle that complexity.

With regards to small HEIs there would be two ways to go about it:

• Eschewing the API approach would put a cap on the kind of functionality we wish to support, so that was not a logical starting point for such exercise.
• We could indeed look for a better suited alternative for small HEIs, but your design shifts effort to a central node, which beyond the KA2 scope. Another option would be to start thinking whether infrastructure could be provided to HEIs such as yours to support the course catalogue data managed which would be connected to EWP from the get go (this, to our knowledge, does not currently exist though).

Hope this goes some way to answer the “why so complex” question.

[Bflange]

Hello,

We are precisely in the same situation as Mathieu described. Our IT department does not have the ressources to implement an API that follows the OCCAPI standards. I asked by colleagues from other Art Schools, nobody in my environment will be able to implement this feature.

WOuld it be possible to develop a solution for small and understaffed HEIs? We depend on easy solutions such as the Dashboard for EWP.

Kind regards,

Bernhard Frank Lange
Institutional Erasmus Coordinator
Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design
Halle (Saale) / Germany