Whilst working with a number of Awarding Bodies, TAG Developments was challenged to address the demand by centres/schools to use their existing ePortfolio, VLE, and Learning Platforms to manage student coursework, and the need of Awarding Bodies to each have one system of their own but that enables them to be system agnostic where centres are concerned so that the Awarding Body could securely receive, manage, mark, monitor and assess coursework electronically no matter what centre system had sent it.  In order to deliver this, TAG Developments had to devise a way of facilitating the bi-directional transfer of data and evidence between the centre based systems and the Awarding Body’s own coursework management system. This bi-directional data transfer had to include the following key elements:

• Populating the centre based system with all candidate and qualification registration information (which ultimately comes from the Awarding Body’s existing back-end Exams Processing System);
• Populating the centre based system with the mark schemes and component structures for each qualification, which is modelled via a TAG developed XML Schema;
• Transferring marks allocated to each candidate from the centre based system into the Awarding Body coursework management system (and then into their back-end systems);
• Transferring each candidate’s portfolio of evidence from the centre based system into the Awarding Body coursework management system (which is then automatically assigned to the moderator/verifier for that centre and disseminated through the Awarding Body system to that person for moderation, along with the marks assigned to that piece of work by the centre).

TAG Developments originally created a similar bi-directional data exchange system using an Application Programming Interface (‘API’) in 2004, but this was purely designed to work between two TAG developed systems, one in the centres and one at an Awarding Body. Subsequently, we re-engineered that original API to make it more robust and fully scalable, and system agnostic.

We believe that this API should be made freely available to any centre based e-portfolio/VLE/Learning Platform provider, and as such, TAG Developments proposed that the API should be published by the British Standards Institute (‘BSI’) as a BSI open standard. This application to BSI has been very positively received by both the BSI themselves and a range of other organisations including the DCSF, BECTA and several awarding bodies and centre based systems providers, as there is no existing standard available in this area. BSI has now formally approved the application and the first BSI working group to formally publish the TAG Developments created API as an open technical standard was held in September 2008. It is hoped that the final standard will be published by BSI in the summer of 2009.