Current use of standards and specifications for practical eLearning Part 1

This is the first of two posts on current use of standards and specifications for  practical eLearning.

Introduction

Our previous post Building user friendly software for interoperability specifications was taking the point of view of addressing developers of interoperable eLearning software.
In this post we address a teacher’s perspective: what if a teacher wants to use some interoperable tools and create some interoperable learning?
We provide a short and basic introduction to eLearning standards and specifications; and we indicate basic things on creating or reusing resources and their integration into interoperable eLearning, specifically, Learning Design.

What are “standards” and “specifications” for interoperability

A specification for interoperability defines a format which enables different applications to import and export documents (this capability of importing and exporting is interoperability). The best known specification is HTML, which is a format for documents on websites which can be opened in any browser, in any computer. HTML was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, and it has been used by nearly everyone who wants to exchange documents on the Web; this makes it a de-facto standard. HTML is also now a standard, because it has been approved by the International Organization for Standardisation, one of the bodies which is authorised by national governments to create official standards. 

Are eLearning interoperability specifications useful?

The Web has shown the advantages of interoperability: when somebody creates a web document s/he knows that everybody will be able to browse it with whatever computer at home, at an internet café, on a mobile phone, … The value is in the document and it is very reusable. The interoperability specifications which the Web is built with are a great help in eLearning, but there is also a need for additional specifications focused on eLearning, which give the same advantages to the users. This will avoid that a change of eLearning software will require the change of the content, which will be very painful for teachers or students.
On the other hand, there are quite a few eLearning aspects which might require specifications. For example, eLearning content providers want to be able to send packages of content which can check that all the materials are present in a directory structure. This is the purpose of IMS Content Packaging. Other specifications are used to define tests, or learning activities. Some of them are discussed below, mainly, Learning Design. 

Who defines eLearning interoperability specifications? 

Anyone can define an eLearning interoperability specification. The difficult part is getting agreement from the eLearning community to adopt the specification. The organisation which has had most success in persuading users to adopt their specifications is IMS, who have developed a series of specifications. These have been adopted by developers and users to varying extents. Some of them are very recent, and this might be a reason for not being yet widely adopted.
Currently, the documents which conform to these specifications are mostly written in XML, which is a somewhat more evolved HTML. These documents are usually hidden from the user, just as the user does not usually see HTML when surfing the Web. Special tools should be provided in order for end users to create/edit eLearning documents (just as a range of applications is available to edit HTML documents).

What is SCORM?

SCORM is the best known application profile in eLearning, and was defined by ADL (and funded by the American Department of Defence). An application profile does not specify a document format, but rather the functionality which an application must have if it is to conform to the profile. In this way content and course developers can be sure that target systems will be able to run their products.
SCORM stands for Sharable Content Object Reference Model. SCORM is a collection of standards and specifications adapted from different sources. Many of the specifications were developed by IMS, for example Simple Sequencing (SS), Question and Test Interoperability (QTI), and Learning Object Metadata (LOM). SCORM was originally intended for use by single learners working without a teacher, but it can of course be used as the basis for other activities too. 

What is “Learning Design”; editing and running Units of Learning

The general concept of learning design refers to the way in which a teacher plans the flow of activities to be carried out by learners in the educational process. IMS has developed a specification called IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) which provides a formal language modelling these pedagogic processes. It aims to be able to model any pedagogy, and is able to represent the activities to be carried out by the teacher and learners. It does this by setting out how people in roles carrying out activities with resources in an environment composed of learning resources and services.
Using IMS-LD authors can develop Units of Learning (UoL), which should be educational processes meaningful in themselves. A UoL is created (by a teacher) by means of an editor. Reload is the reference editor for IMS-LD. These UoLs are, technically, IMS Content Packages, which means they are zip files containing a directory structure of files, which follow the specification IMS-Content Packaging. The parallel with the HTML documents of the web, is that the documents are created with an editor such as FrontPage, or Mozilla, …
Students can follow UoLs, and teachers can keep track of what students are doing in a UoL: the UoL is said to be running when this happens. The UoL will be run in a player application, in a similar way as we need a browser (such as Explorer, or Firefox) for viewing HTML documents created with an editor. This player application can coordinate the learning activities, ensuring that the right resources and instructions are sent to the right people at the right time, and that their interactions are synchronised (besides keeping track of the interactions). The reference player application of IMS-LD is CopperCore.

Part 2 will be published next week.

1 comment September 20th, 2006