These are my thoughts based on observations and may not reflect the actual state of project Glue, Course Exchange or MDM
The idea for project glue came out of the Course Exchange project. The key requirement of Course Exchange is that a student at one district/college be allowed to enroll in a class offered at another district/college from a single use interface
Each district/college uses different Student Information Systems, Student Directories and Master Data sets to support their own student population. Project Glue was born out of the necessity for colleges to share course and student information from disparate systems using a common set of API interfaces, "College Adaptors" are SIS and/or college specific implementations of the standard API interfaces.
In reality, there x major Student information systems used across the CCC system including
- Banner
- PeopleSoft
- Colleague
Banner, PeopleSoft and Colleague adaptors have been implemented and colleges using these systems can used the pre-created adaptors with only configuration changes.
Colleges that have implemented custom SIS will need to develop custom College Adaptors.
As previously mentioned, each college SIS requires a source of Master data
Master Data can be described as the key business information that supports the transactions.
Master Data describes the customers, products, parts, employees, materials, suppliers, sites, etc involved in the transactions. It is commonly referred to
as Places (locations, geography, sites, etc.), Parties (persons, customers, suppliers, employees, etc.) and Things (products, items, material, vehicles, etc.).
Master data in the context of Course Exchange.
The following diagram is the DB schema for course exchange.
Drilling into the schema, there are data sets that are not only specific to Course Exchange but are also useful in other applications such as CCCApply, MyPath and Common Assessment.
Some of these data sets include
- Districts
- Schools (Colleges)
- Persons (Students)
- Terms
Apply currently requires colleges to maintain an Apply specific tables for Districts, Colleges and Terms. College Staff typically enter this data in their own College SIS, then re-enter the exact same data in the Apply Administrator Application. What this means is that we now maintain multiple sets of duplicate master data at the colleges and in the Apply database.