This field will be determined by the institution and in this context relates to the complete programme of study leading to the qualification aim referred to in fields Course.COURSEAIM and CourseSubject.

All courses

To facilitate HESA cross-checking with institutions and to identify courses in onward analyses.

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.

Feedback from users of the TQI site has indicated that they would want to see information at the course level. With the introduction of the course entity it is likely that the funding councils will want to explore this option further. Should users of the HESA data choose to publish course level information it is likely that the course title will form a critical part of this. Therefore institutions need to ensure that the CTITLE field contains course titles that would be meaningful to a wide range of stakeholders including potential students

It is intended that this field can be used by the institution as a cross-check to fields Course.COURSEAIM and CourseSubject.

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.