Background to Compass

Compass began as a bid in response to the JISC 7/99 call for work in developing Managed Learning Environments. The focus was on developing a cohesive structure in which a managed learning environment could exist seamlessly with other collaborative software, and led to an examination of how Nottingham could become a 'joined-up institution' where systems that had grown up separately could be integrated.

The text of the original bid can be found here.

We began with a fairly abstract concept, the joined-up environment for a student, and attempted to draw up a list of functionality that would support that. This was performed at the same time as our search for a VLE to adopt as a standard, and we attempted to include requirements from both perspectives. It was a necessary exercise, and allowed for a good deal of discussion about what could be achieved in an ideal scenario, but left us with a specification that declared most of the identified objectives as of primary importance and was not matched in the real world by a product! Nevertheless it was helpful in that views were shared that helped us refine our purpose, and gave us a basis for investigating the best match in the marketplace. We were also assisted by the experience of many other sites who were able to share their rationale for choosing their VLE, and this was narrowed down to Blackboard or WebCT.

Two more reports were helpful in refining our thinking. The investigation into portal software looked at the products available in January 2001, and concluded that the market itself was immature. Although we were working to a strong imperative to buy off the shelf, we concluded that that hardly mitigated against the risk. All products were extremely expensive, and still left us with the hardest parts, integration to our own systems, to achieve on our own. The report is available here.

http://www.eis.nottingham.ac.uk/compass/

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