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2002/03/12: draft 2 of BC&C article on IMS

Educational Technology Standards: A Guide for the Perplexed

One needs to spend very little time in the world of educational technology before encountering the jargon of specifications and standards, such terms as IMS, "SCORM compliant", "metadata", "interoperability", "XML", and "learning objects". Typical of software specifications in general, educational technology specifications are expected to document relevant data architectures, communication protocols, APIs, programming interfaces, and best practices. Some "specs" go one to become de jure standards, ones that have been officially recognized as a standard by an accrediting body. Some specifications become de facto standards, "existing in fact whether with lawful authority or not." The most potent standards are both de jure and de facto. [28]

To understand the significance of standards, consider their place in the specific case of learning management systems (LMS). "Learning management system tool kits, such as CourseInfo and WebCT, help faculty create and organize course web pages; communicate with students via online discussion groups and chat rooms; manage online gradebooks and class lists; administer online surveys and exams; track student web site use; manage online course calendars; and much more." [5] The campus currently maintains a server for WebCT and Blackboard and is considering other options for the future. [26]

Regardless of what LMS vendors want might others to believe, a LMS, no matter how functional it is, is only one environment among many used by our students, faculty, and staff use. A good LMS does not stand alone but works (interoperates) with other software. Ideally, faculty who have authored their slides and notes in their favorite program (such as Microsoft Office or LaTeX) should be able to import them into a LMS with little effort. Students should automatically be assigned to the correct course site in the LMS once they have registered for a given class. Good digital materials developed for one course might be reused in another course into the same or another LMS -- or exported to a PDF file. The campus should be able to migrate from one LMS to another one with minimal amount of lock-in. Students and faculty might want to import images or text documents from the Library to the LMS. A faculty member might want to create course materials for widest distribution.

The Role of Standards and Specifications

Common standards in the educational technology realm are designed to make possible the scenarios of digital materials flowing between software systems. A recent report by the MASIE Center provides an excellent distillation of the value of standards. "Standards help to ensure the five "abilities" mentioned below and to protect and even nurture e-Learning investments": [28, p. 8]

• Interoperability - can the system work with any other system?
• Re-usability - can courseware (Learning Objects, or "chunks") be re-used?
• Manageability - can a system track the appropriate information about the learner and the content?
• Accessibility - can a learner access the appropriate content at the appropriate time?
• Durability - will the technology evolve with the standards to avoid obsolescence?
  

In concrete terms, standards enhance the ability to: [28, p. 5]

• Mix and match content from multiple sources
• Develop interchangeable content that can be assembled, disassembled, and re-used quickly and easily
• Ensure that buyers are not "trapped" by a particular vendor's proprietary learning technology
• Ensure that our learning technology investments are wise and risk adverse
• Increase the effectiveness of learning by enabling greater personalization and targeting of the right content to the right person at the right time
• Improve the efficiency and ROI of learning content development and managementIncrease the quantity and quality of learning content

IMS

There are a lot of standards and specifications that are important, especially in the area of interoperability. So much interoperabilty work is pinned on XML and associated technologies situated as the second generation Web. [24, 31]

As for specifications to meet the particular needs of educational technology, arguably the most important ones are those being developed by IMS Global Learning Consortium.[8] "Since its formation as an Educom project in 1997, it has developed a membership that includes almost all the leading technology system suppliers, publishers and many user organisations including leading US universities active in eLearning. It has since become an independent, subscription-based non-profit organisation,.... While it aims to be technology and pedagogy neutral, it inevitably has to represent the interests of its subscribers. " [3]. Contributing members include: UC Berkeley, Blackboard, WebCT, Microsoft, IBM, California State, MIT, University of Michigan, Cambridge University. The campus' representative to IMS is Fred Beshears of Educational Technology Services. [6]

IMS formulates specifications that it promotes in hope of their becoming de facto (and possibly de jure) standards for products in educational technology. IMS specifications currently cover the following areas [9] [10] [12] [11]

• content-packaging ("will make it easier to create reusable content objects that will be useful in a variety of learning systems.")
  
• metadata ("a uniform way for describing learning resources so that they can be more easily found (discovered), using meta-data aware search tools that reflect the unique needs of users in learning situations.")
  
• enterprise ("aimed at administrative applications and services that need to share data about learners, courses, performance, etc., across platforms, operating systems, user interfaces, and so on.")
  
• question and testing ("provides proposed standard XML language for describing questions and tests. The specification has been produced to allow the interoperability of content within assessment systems.")
• learner information ("collection of information about a Learner (individual or group learners) or a Producer of learning content (creators, providers or vendors)")
• competency definitions ("defines an information model for describing, referencing and exchanging definitions of competencies, primarily in the context of online and distributed learning")
• accessibility ("framework will set the stage...to ensure education that is truly accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere.")
  

I will give you an example of how I plan to use IMS specifications in my work with the Interactive University Project, whose goal is "to enable Berkeley to make its unique resources of people and knowledge available on the Internet to K-12 educators."[23] The IU is developing a new model [14] that involves collaborative communities (between the university and K-12) producing, creating, and disseminating curricular materials and learning objects, "digital resource that can be reused to support learning".[7, 25, 27, 29] Packaged as XML and associated with relevant K-12 and discipline-specific metadata, these learning objects will be flexible and reusable documents, assembled and distributed in the IU Open Learning Environment (IU-OLE), a web environment in which California's teachers, students, and family members will be able to find and access, manipulate, assemble, and share these documents. We have been strongly considering packaging the learning objects in an XML format specified by the IMS-CP specification, marked up with IMS-MD conformant metadata. IMS-CP specifies how digital content is packaged ("boxed up") or organized while IMS-MD specifies how to apply metadata to this content ("what type of label to put on the boxes").

On a more general level, he IMS specifications should be of continuing interest to the Berkeley campus not only because the vendors for the current campus LMS setups (WebCT and Blackboard) have shown a commitment to these standards but also because MIT's OKI has expressed intention to collaborate with IMS while it is actively developing its API.[19] Regardless of what direction the campus goes in terms of LMS, IMS will be an important technical undergirding.

Other Relevant Standards

The world of educational interoperability standards encompasses efforts other than those of IMS. An excellent overview from CETIS explains the relationship among IMS, AICC, CEN/ISSS, PROMETEUS, ADL/SCORM, IEEE LTSC, IS0, BSI, ARIADNE, and Dublin Core.[3] Of these efforts, I reproduce the description for ADL/SCORM [1] because of its particular weight on the American scene: "ADLNet (Advanced Distributed Learning Network) is an initiative sponsored by the US federal government to 'accelerate large-scale development of dynamic and cost-effective learning software and to stimulate an efficient market for these products in order to meet the education and training needs of the military and the nation's workforce of the future.' "As part of this objective, ADL produce SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), a specification for reusable learning content. Outside the defence sector, SCORM is being adopted by a number of training and education vendors as a useful standard for learning content. Version 1.2 of SCORM will also incorporate the IMS Metadata and Content Packaging specifications."

Outside of the cluster of education technology standards (those tracked by CETIS for example), a group of inter-related specifications and standards in use for libraries and museums (such as Z39.50, MARC, EAD, MOA2, and METS) merit mention here.[4, 21, 22] Let's consider specifically Making of America II (MOA2) and METS. MOA2 is a project of the Berkeley Library sponsored under the auspices of the Digital Library Federation to encode "defined descriptive, administrative and structural metadata, along with the primary content, inside a digital library object" [16] METS is the successor to MOA2 and a standard rapidly gaining acceptance in the library world.[17] There are obvious natural connections between the library and educational technology worlds. For one, I expect that many faculty and students will want to move materials between the IMS conformant software and digital libraries. (That's certainly the case with the Interactive University.) Work on mapping specifications between METS and IMS (performing a "crosswalk") or harmonizing the standards would aid interoperability between the educational technology and library worlds. [30]

Current Practical Implementations and Campus Activities

As a software developer and architect, I have found that the best way to understand these standards is to implement them in practice. I began this process by seeing whether I could generate a valid IMS Content-Package that could be imported into WebCT via its Content Migration Utitlity [20] I have used Microsoft's LRN 3.0 which includes a viewer and editor for valid IMS-CP packages and a utility for converting PowerPoint and FrontPage files to IMS-CP packages.[18] Other practical implementations ready for download (but which I have not used) include Macromedia's extensions to various products (including Dreamweaver) [15] and a Java-based toolkit from Sun for creating IMS conformant metadata. [13] CETIS maintains a directory of products with claims of IMS compliance. [2]

Finally, a local IMS special interest group has just formed. Please contact Fred Beshears for more information.

References