This field is determined by the institution and, in this context, relates to the specific module which in turn can be a component in many courses.

All modules

To facilitate HESA cross-checking with institutions.

Although a compulsory field, this field will not be subject to specific checks regarding its validity. The only validation checks will be that the field contains at least one character.

Users of HESA data will occasionally consult this field in order to gain a better understanding of the subjects/activity contained in the module. Therefore institutions are encouraged to make these data meaningful where this does not significantly add to the burden of collection

The valid characterset available for this field has been defined by a specific study undertaken as a part of the MIAP Common Data Definitions (CDD) project. The conclusions of this study were:

• The general policy is to support all Latin-based characters for names, addresses and general text fields, but not non-Latin characters.
• All Unicode code charts for Latin characters are supported. These are Basic Latin (excluding the C0 control characters), Latin-1 (excluding the C1 control characters), Latin Extended A, Latin Extended B and Latin Extended Additional. This set corresponds to Unicode code points U+0020 to U+007F and U+00A0 to U+024F.
• Schemas are built in such a way that an individual project can further restrict the set if required.

The character set chosen will support Welsh and Gaelic languages as well as all European and most other languages using a Latin-based character set.

The Unicode charts that list each of the characters in this range can be found on the Unicode web site. The specific sets that are defined here are shown in the following PDF documents:

• Basic Latin
• Latin-1
• Latin Extended A
• Latin Extended B
• Latin Extended Additional

XML files must be encoded with UTF-8 if they contain characters beyond the standard ASCII character set. Institutions are advised to specify the encoding used in their XML files (i.e. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>) and to ensure that their files are actually saved with that encoding. Files with an explicit encoding declaration other than UTF-8 will be rejected. Files with undeclared encoding will be assumed to be UTF-8. If encoding is not specified or does not match the actual file encoding, institutions are warned that there is a risk that data contained in the files may be changed on submission to HESA.