Interoperability for Open Content in Education

Open Content in education relates to the ability of (re-)using the content produced by somebody else in a different educational context. Although it is very good that one is allowed to use or modify the content according to a legal framework respecting the author’s rights, an important practical question arises: will that be possible when using different systems, or different computers? A positive answer to this question should be provided by interoperability; its goal is to enable that content works across different applications, operating systems, computers, …

The World Wide Web is probably the best example of interoperability achievement: the web documents use html as language and a http protocol, which have been widely adopted. Thus, in general, web documents can be seen with different computers, operating systems, browsers, … In this sense, this is an excellent basis for Open Content.

However, the functions needed in education go beyond “seeing” documents. For instance, most e-learning in practice is based on Learning Management Systems (such as WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, …) which have functions that enable student tracking, content organisation, assessment, administration … These Learning Management Systems are largely not interoperable, since functionalities such as those we have just mentioned do not transfer easily from one system to the other. For the author it means that s/he is locked to one system, and changes of system are expensive in human resources.

How to enable interoperability? Through agreeing interoperability specifications, which all the applications, systems should follow to allow for it. When these specifications have been agreed by certain international bodies, they are called standards. Currently there are several organisations which have proposed specifications in the e-learning area. IMS is the most important and acknowledged among them. The most significant IMS specification from an interoperability perspective is IMS Learning Design (IMS LD, for short). According to this specification, besides the mere content, a learning design has to be provided, a sort of a real lesson plan; the perspective is that people in roles, such as student, teacher, tutor, …, develop activities (with a certain educational flow) within an environment which includes resources, tools, … Using this type of description, the goal is that educational descriptions can be really re-used, they can be moved across  different Learning Management Systems – and actual implementation can also be exchanged.

The adoption of a specification depends to a large extent on the availability of good, well-documented, open source implementations. Due to the complexity and recentness of IMS LD, just a few compliant tools have been implemented. The most significant are the Reload editor, the CopperCore engine, and the Sled player. Several European R+D projects focus on different aspects of the standard and are also producing new tools. However, the limited set of available tools is making authors to use other open source tools, being Moodle the main option. Moodle provides an easy-to-understand interface, as well as an easy and well-documented API that enables developers to adapt the tool. A huge community of Moodle authors, users and developers already exists, where a big number of learning resources is accessible. In fact many universities are moving its learning management systems from commercial solutions to Moodle.

Whether Moodle will become a sort of standard de facto is not clear, although not unlikely. Nevertheless, there are efforts in the Moodle community to support IMS LD units of learning, which would be an important achievement from an interoperability point of view. Meanwhile, new tools have to be developed for IMS LD, where a key factor that has to be considered is the new social approach of using the web (Web 2.0), and its implications in the learning process.

Josep Blat and Toni Navarrete. Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Add comment May 9th, 2007