Producing a Diploma Supplement
Introduction
Producing a Diploma Supplement is largely a matter of identifying information sources and producing a well formatted report showing the required fields. For most institutions the majority of the required information will be readily accessible from the student record system. Other information will be constant throughout all the Diploma Supplements and therefore can be defaulted into the report, produced as 'boilerplate' text or stored within the database in user extensible or purpose developed fields.
Where information cannot be readily incorporated into the Diploma Supplement itself, some institutions have opted to include hyperlinks to institutional websites where the required information can be found.
The following case studies are intended to be indicative rather than prescriptive and include a range of different proprietary Student Record Systems. Even where an institution uses one of the example systems it is unlikely that the example will be immediately applicable; the flexibility and configurability of the systems coupled with differing practices and standards from one institution to another means that there will inevitably be differences in implementation within each institution. However it is hoped that there will be enough commonality for the case studies to be useful examples of where the required information may be found within student record systems.
It may be helpful to note that all the contributing institutions are already producing transcripts most of which are closely modelled on the Diploma Supplement. (For the purposes of this project the definition of a Diploma Supplement is that found in the UK HE Europe Unit document 'Guide to The Diploma Supplement').
The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) student record return also contains much (though not all) of the information required for a Diploma Supplement. The mappings shown below for Diploma Supplement to HESA student record can be used in two ways. Firstly as a direct source of information; by decoding the HESA values a partial Diploma Supplement can be generated and the missing fields sourced from other systems. Alternatively the HESA return can be used as a key to finding the information within an institution's own student record system, i.e. identifying the source of the HESA field also identifies the source for the Diploma Supplement field.
The four institutional case studies provide some valuable insights into producing a Diploma Supplement as defined by the Bologna Process. None of the proprietary systems in the studies provided 'out of the box' structures to hold all the defined fields and each institution had made decisions and compromises to address this issue. Two of the institutions had made significant modifications to the application's schema in order to hold the information they required. Similarly two institutions embed references to areas of their website in the supplement to provide information while the other two have addressed this issue in different ways.
Unsurprisingly the four systems studied all incorporated common structures such as 'general person/student', programme of study, student on programme, student on module, etc. Consequently to a large extent the Diploma Supplement fields were found in similar areas of the schema and those fields that could not be satisfied were largely consistent across all the case studies, including HESA.
The example student systems are Tribal's SITS:Vision, Oracle: Student System, PeopleSoft Student Records and SunGard: Banner. Our thanks go to all the institutions and HESA who contributed their time, knowledge and advice to this project.
