Comments on: UCAS Course code lookup

By: Ucas Code, Ucas “API” and guardian data « DevXS-UCAS

Ucas Code, Ucas “API” and guardian data « DevXS-UCAS — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:51:21 +0000

[...] http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2009/10/ucas-course-code-lookup/ [...]

By: Matt Newboult

Matt Newboult — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 09:35:45 +0000

Thanks for the reply. It’s a shame that the number of UCAS points required isn’t easier to get really.

By: ostephens

ostephens — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:00:41 +0000

Hi Matt,

You may have seen, I did update this service – documented at http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2010/03/ucas-course-code-lookup-take-two/

However, it still doesn’t return the information you mention I’m afraid. There is a bit more detail in one of my comments at http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2010/03/read-to-learn-updated/#comments about this. Essentially I’m grabbing data from the UCAS search results – which only includes a minimal amount of data for each course and while there is some extra data on this page that I could scrape with a little extra effort, it doesn’t include the entry requirements etc. To get this information I’d have to go into the next level of the UCAS website.

I’d need to go back and look, but I’m sure that it wouldn’t be a good idea to do this for all the courses returned against a single search – it would just take forever. However, what might be possible is adding a new function that returns the details for a single course/institution – would that be of interest still? If it is, I would be happy to see how difficult/easy it might be.

By: Matt Newboult

Matt Newboult — Mon, 24 May 2010 10:30:52 +0000

Do you think there’s ever a chance you might write a service that lets you get the entry requirements/course score for a given course/institution? Would be great to see this expanded.

By: UCAS Course code lookup: Take two » Overdue Ideas

UCAS Course code lookup: Take two » Overdue Ideas — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:51:48 +0000

[...] year as part of the JISC MOSAIC competition, I put together a script which allowed you to search the online UCAS catalogue using a course code, and get an XML response. The XML it returned was just a basic format which suited my purposes at [...]

By: Linked Data Explored « PIPaL – JISC Business and Community Engagement project at Loughborough

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:54:25 +0000

[...] in combination with structured data in a format such as XML, many doors are opened. For example JACS course codes and XCRI course advertising in combination potentially allow a prospective student to “shop around” to see which [...]

By: ostephens

ostephens — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:01:12 +0000

Thanks Alan – it’s very good to hear that there is work happening to make this information more accessible. I’m aware of the XCRi model and the XCRi-CAP work, and did wonder if I could output my scraped results in this format, but in the end decided for something quicker and dirtier for my purposes.

I don’t know if this is something you are looking at with UCAS, but I’m not sure that their approach to using JACS codes to form UCAS codes is that helpful. It would be nicer if they recorded the full JACS codes (with a searchable index) for each course, rather than creating the short code in the way they do currently.

I was wondering about linking from UCAS codes to (for example) learning objects in JORUM (which I understand use JACS) – which would require decoding the UCAS code to the constituent JACS codes (and of course the UCAS code is lossy from the original JACS codes)

By: Alan Paull

Alan Paull — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:48:18 +0000

Re:
“Dealing with UCAS
UCAS really don’t make it easy to get information out of their website on a machine-to-machine basis. I’ve done an entire post on scraping information from UCAS, which I’m not going to rehash here, but honestly if we are going to see people developing applications which help individuals build personalised learning pathways through Higher Education courses this has got to improve.”

I strongly sympathise, having worked alongside UCAS on a few JISC-funded projects myself. I’m currently working with a range of projects to do with course advertising information (see: http://www.xcri.org/), which includes working with UCAS (somewhat) to encourage a service oriented approach to the whole range of UCAS vocabularies, including JACS and others related to both courses and applications. Progress is slow, but in the next two to three weeks we are hoping for a bit of a breakthrough. Please contact me if you want more info on the UCAS angle.

Our eXchanging Course Related Information (XCRi) information model and XML schema, plus work we’ve done already on making course advertising information available may be of interest. Some of this work is out of the University of Huddersfield via the West Yorks Lifelong Learning Network; for contact details, please contact alan@alanpaull.co.uk.

By: Do you Read to Learn? » Overdue Ideas

Do you Read to Learn? » Overdue Ideas — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:07:01 +0000

[...] information out of their website on a machine-to-machine basis. I’ve done an entire post on scraping information from UCAS, which I’m not going to rehash here, but honestly if we are going to see people developing [...]

By: David Kay

David Kay — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:26:11 +0000

MOSAIC as a project is concerned with both the possibilities and the problems (of all types) relating to the use of library and learning activity data to enhance both the user experience and resource management functions – so this post provides some very welcome pointers for the final report to be written next month …

And therefore (as per the previous post) everyone’s a wiinner

Keep it coming!