Posts filed under 'IMS Learning Design'
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.
May 9th, 2007
This is the second of two posts on current use of standards and specifications for practical eLearning.
Practical work with IMS-LD
As we have indicated in Part 1 (posted on September 20th), IMS-LD helps to define the pedagogical processes; that is why we focus on IMS-LD. The pedagogical processes will usually be based on resources. A teacher will usually create a lesson plan (on paper, or mentally), which can be synonimous of a path for the students, using some readings, images (in general, resources), putting some questions, …
When this is clear and settled, the practical work usually takes the inverse order. First, the resources are individually gathered; and then integrated in the path.
Let us start then with the resources.
General indications for learning resources
- Documents used in learning resources should open in a Web browser
- The best format to use is HTML, as
- it is simple to edit with free tools (such as Mozilla)
- it will open in freely available browsers
- it is very compact
- An alternative is PDF, this is
- useful if you want your document to be read only
- easy to open in a web browser
- Sound
- Compression in order to have small files is always an issue which is important to consider.
- While wav/aiff is a standard, it is usually not compressed, and, perhaps, it is recommended to use mp3 (which is a part of an audiovisual standard called MPEG), as it is currently widely used; other formats which open in most browsers could be an alternative.
- Graphics/Still images
- Compression in order to have small files is always an issue which is important to consider even more than for sound.
- The best format to use is JPG / JPEG, as it is both a standard and widely used; according to the quality required, the size of of the image will be big (for highest quality) or small (for lowest quality). Gif is also widely used on the web for graphics, although it is a proprietary format; SVG has been recently proposed by W3C, the Web consortium.
- Video
- Compression is even more important for video, in order to have small files.
- The recommended format is mpeg, which is standard (although there are different mpegs), although Real, QuickTime, Windows Media usually open in most browsers - these are formats, and can use different compressors, which sometimes is difficult to deal with.
In summary resources should be created in the most standard format, which can usually done with free tools; the way to check this flexibility is that resources should open in different Web browsers.
General indications about creating UoLs
Once the resources are around, a UoL can be created, according to the lesson plan envisaged. This requires an IMS-LD editor. As we have indicated, Reload is the reference editor for IMS-LD. Let us mention that there are other editors, which are special for IMS-LD such as ASK-LDT; or modified to use LD (MOT+, and current work for the well known Moodle …). Some of the editors that are appearing are more user friendly than others (for instance, ASK-LDT is a graphical one, although it does not cover the whole specification, as Reload does). As we indicated in our previous post, current Pompeu Fabra University work about to be released includes an easy to use IMS-LD editor based on templates, Edubat. Let us mention the related work Collage.
Other aspects to be considered are:
- Packaging of files
- Units of Learning developed using IMS-LD have to be distributed using IMS Content Packaging, which is a zip file with a manifest describing the contents.
- Tests and assessments
- If you want to include a test or assessment in your Unit of Learning to be run by the computer, it is convenient to use QTI, which is the corresponding IMS specification; the alternative being tests or assessments that open on browsers.
- Services such as e-mail, chat, forums … are part of the IMS-LD environments
- They are very useful for the pedagogical path in e-Learning.
- You can include some of them using the IMS-LD editor.
- Metadata is ‘data which describes other data’
- There are standards for general document metadata, , such as the author, the subject …, the main one being Dublin Core or eLearning specific: IMS Learning Object Metadata.
- Availability of metadata can be very useful in locating resources, but it can also be time consuming for users to provide the necessary information to describe the learning resources.
- One can (and should) add basic metadata about the UoL created, by means of the editor; the metadata is kept inside the IMS-LD xml document itself (the manifest)
- It is also a good idea to use Dublin Core in the HTML of theresources (there is a metadata tag, which, again, remains hidden when browsing)
- One could optionally add more metadata using LOM, either in the IMS-LD manifest, or in the Content Package.
Running eLearning
This is not very user-friendly now.
Before a UoL run, one has to assign the users the different roles that might have been defined in the UoL (and to this UoL, of course). Currently, there is a DOS command line tool (CLICC) provided by OUNL. Pompeu Fabra University is close to release a friendlier tool.
The e-learning running needs a Web server with the addition of CopperCore, an alternative being SLED (which includes CopperCore); where of course the UoLs should be stored and managed - as the tracking of the run. Again, Pompeu Fabra University is working on a tool for this management.
The OpenDock project is establishing a repository of UoLs which can be run easily.
September 25th, 2006
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.
September 20th, 2006
Open specifications for interoperable learning technology should be very useful, because they enable the users to rely on their own systems, without the resources, or the implementation of teaching or learning being dependent on specific proprietary systems. As an example of the usefulness of open specifications, let us recall that the web is based on the HTML language, and this has allowed us to be highly independent of proprietary systems.
IMS is one of the main organisations which develops open specifications for eLearning. Several IMS specifications have become worldwide standards for delivering learning products and services, and the move is going on. However, these specifications are difficult to use by people with rather simplistic technological background such as teachers, small learning institutions, and others.
In order to facilitate the dissemination of these standards, the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona has been working on a set of experimental tools that provide user friendly interfaces for some IMS specifications such as Question & Test Interoperability, and Learning Design. The technical development work is based on libraries which were developed in Java to implement functionalities associated with the specifications such as saving and instance of a schema, verifying the instance’s compatibility with the specifications, and implementing the fields, data structures, and relations defined in the specifications. These libraries mirror in their structure a direct mapping of the specification hierarchy into a set of Java classes.
The QAed tool developed at Pompeu Fabra University is a complete open source implementation that facilitates the creation and management of assessment repositories, based on a user centered strategy. It implements a subset of the IMS Question & Test Interoperability specification known as QTI-Lite. IMS specifications promote coordination between distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors and this is also supported by QAed. The tool relies on a set of QTI-Lite Libraries which could be reused in the context of any e-learning framework and are part of the set of libraries mentioned in the previous paragraph. The QAed tool is a standalone application based on teachers’ needs, and implements some practical functionalities which go beyond the specification.
IMS QTI specification is evolving. The current version is QTI 2.0, and there is a quite developed draft of version 2.1. Current Pompeu Fabra University efforts related to QTI involve the upgrade of the libraries to cover a large part of the 2.0 and the 2.1 draft specifications which have been mentioned. The work is building on that of the JISC funded project APIS, but major additions and restructuring have already taken place. The resulting libraries will be released in the immediate future. In the framework of the European TenCompetence project, QAed, which is a stand-alone application, is also being transformed into an open-source plug-in for service oriented architectures (such as those supported by JISC and DEST eFramework). Current Pompeu Fabra University work also includes an easy to use editor based on templates for the Learning Design specification. Let us mention the related work Collage and the RELOAD Learning Design editor.
Experimentations with these tools are helping to design a way to bring the IMS specifications a visage that can be utilized by novice learners or learning designers in producing, distributing, and consuming learning components in accordance with global specifications.
July 19th, 2006
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