Category: Elearning Standards

Reports from the CETIS Vocabularies Project

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elp_vocabularies.html

Wow, what can one say, these reports from the Cetis Vocabularies Project are nothing if not exhaustive. Pretty well everything one could ever want to know about controlled vocabularies for pedagogical resources are contained in these three reports. And if you needed more evidence of the width of the gap between the ‘big standards‘ approach to learning resources and where the best minds of the loosely coupled elearning blogosphere seem to be going, well look no further.

I am really in no position to cast stones; I’d be lucky if my house were made out of even glass, and I sure ain’t without sin. But the 121 pages that comprise the first two survey reports, the Pedagogical Vocabularies Review and the Vocabulary Management Technologies Review, seem hardly to justify the tepid 7 page ‘Recommendations’ document that follows. Study study study, disseminate, more study, pilot a bit, repeat. Sorry guys, I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this; I want to take succour in the belief we can control the growing chaos, find sense through old patterns and methods, but you know what, I can’t do it anymore, I have seen the light, and this is not it. Whoa, dude, your unconscious is showing…put on a towel or something, at least! – SWL

CETIS writeup on Alt-I-Lab 2005 Demonstrators

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content2/20050901184010

It’s been eagerly awaited (at least by me!), and likely delayed because of all the other stuff going on at CETIS and the need for the good folks there to take a well-deserved break this summer, but we are all fortunate to finally get a more detailed write-up on the interoperability demos from the past Alt-i-lab sessions held in June in the U.K.

While this writeup does put some more meat on the bone and help us understand more about Learning Design, Tools Interoperability Profile and repository interoperability, I can’t help but think that recording some of these sessions (and maybe some screen recorded demos too) would be helpful for spreading the word and illustrating the concepts to a wider audience. Maybe next time 😉 Still, seems reason to hope that we’re moving along from abstract specs to support interoperability to actual working systems, hooray! – SWL

Remote Question Protocol

http://mantis.york.ac.uk/moodle/course/view.php?id=14

You know there has to be something to this because a) it hasn’t been widely hyped, as far as I know b) they actually seem to be shipping code and working specifications. What a nice contrast. A high level description of this web services protocol to provide remote processing of assessment items on behalf of assessment systems, independant of specific CMS, can be found in this PDF file. Apparently Moodle is already supporting this, and it is on the radar for the people working on the Tools Interoperability Profile. – SWL

Report Comparing eXe with other elearning authoring packages

http://eduforge.org/docman/view.php/20/243/
eXe_report_sbritain.pdf

This report by Sandy Britain was commissioned by the University of Auckland and released back in April, but I only just stumbled upon it. I’ve been arguing for at least a year now that one of the next places we need to focus our attention on is better tools for authoring, especially for authoring XML-based, standards compliant elearning content. XML is not a fringe technology, and it’s far past the time when we should be requiring content in higher ed to be well structured and easily re-published in other formats, something I take it that these editors can help with and that continuing with outmoded HTML editors doesn’t. Britain acknowledges that there are potentially far more tools to examine than the 4 he compares eXe with (Burrokeet, Lectora, SoftChalk Lesson Builder, and Lersus); I would have liked to see at least ThinkingCap Studio and the ICE System in there as well, and to this end am hoping we at Edutools can get a comparative analysis project going to look at these and more. [If you have a pot of money lying around 😉 and would like to see such a comparison happen, please feel free to contact me.] Still, a good overview and introduction to the issue. – SWL

D-Lib Article – Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/weibel/07weibel.html

Rarely do you get a chance to read reflections by someone with as much experience as Stuart L. Weibel, the Senior Research Scientist with OCLC, on 10 years of work around Dublin Core and digital metadata standards. And frank too – he concedes that we’ve all perhaps been too optimistic about the ‘author contributed’ model of metadata submission, and also that metadata in general has to find its place (if it has one at all) in the full-text searchable digitized world of the web. Check out also the great pictures of the bogeys (wheel carriages) that move entire trains between railway lines of different gauges between China and Mongolia. – SWL

Presentation: “Licences, Features, and Community: The Path to Sustainability”

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/events/
2005-07-04/I050704F_OSS_Watch.pdf

Slides from the recent “Building Open Source Communities” conference held in Edinburgh have now been posted. My favourite so far was the above by Jim Farmer of uPortal and now Sakai fame. It’s quite a sprawling piece that covers many aspects of the “business” of open source and higher education. I appreciated the lack of dogmatism and the willingness to acknowledge some of the risks in software development, and also the notion that open source can help customers take care of the ‘core’ by helping to address the ‘context.’ – SWL

Presentations available from 2005 Alt-i-Lab sessions

http://www.imsglobal.org/altilab/

June has been a busy month in the post-secondary elearning world; along with the release of Sakai 2.0, another major milestone happened this month at the Alt-i-lab sessions in Sheffield, England. The page above links to many of the presentations and demonstrations that took place there, possibly most notable of which was the first practical demonstration of the Tool Interoperability across multiple CMS. A summary of the demonstration by Chris Vento is available, which seems to be cause for cautious optimism; unfortunately, the only ‘independant’ report I’ve been able to find (not having attended myself) is this one from the Learning Technology Standards Observatory. One can only hope that Wilbert Kraan and the folks at CETIS will come to the rescue with another of their lucid and helpful write-ups to explain what this really all means.

But I would be remiss in not pointing to some other sessions of note; for me the one that jumped off the page as I read further was the working session on “A Common Cartridge for Robust Content Delivery.” This group basically proposed to tackle the problem of content interoperability once more in light of the current situation:

“It’s five years later. The major elearning providers have implemented IMS specifications; many customers mandate compliance with some form of them. However, software vendors and suppliers, consumers, and maintainers of content have not worked together to create a detailed de facto understanding of what implementation means. So while elearning firms market ‘compliance’ with IMS specifications, and some have been certified as compliant with a specific version of the specifications; the lack of practical interoperability has left us in a place not sufficiently different than where we were prior to the IMS specification effort began.”

It’s nice to see the problem being owned up to (no real news to folks in the trenchs who have become increasingly dismayed as the variety of implementations of IMS Content Packaging failed to bring them the content portability and freedom from vendor lock-in they had hoped for). Too early yet to say if the proposed idea of “Content Cartridges” can have any better effect, but the idea of compliance testing and publisher involvement in the standards both seem improvements. – SWL

IMS Compliance Program

http://www.imsproject.org/conformance/index.html

I could be wrong, but this seems new, and welcome at that. IMS has announced this new Compliance Program which outlines methods for developers of content, services and applications to provide evidence to support conformance claims based on self testing, and in so doing rate the claim of “IMS Conformant.” While we have had the ability to verify SCORM conformance now for some time, this is the first, as far as I know, where claims concerning IMS specifications that aren’t included in SCORM (and there are many) will have some form of verification applied to them. Announcements to this effect should start to circulate later this year as the first products work their way through the process. – SWL

Open Knowledge Initiative Delivers XOSID Specification

http://www.imsglobal.org/news.html

The specifications geeks in the crowd will want to note (and probably have already seen) this joint announcement by IMS and OKI that they have released an XML binding or representation of OKI’s Open Service Interface Definitions (OSID), previously only officially available as Java APIs. Wilbert Kraan at CETIS has written an article which as usual does an excellent job detailing some of the implications of this work. – SWL