Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Establishing a National Curriculum in Australia has proven to be an elusive goal for the past forty years, for a variety of reasons. The Federal Government has decided to go ahead with establishing a National Curriculum, and has established the National Curriculum Board, to make it a reality [EDIT: now under the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)]. The Board’s work is well underway: the Shaping Papers and Framing Papers for the curriculum, in the priority areas of English, maths, the sciences and history, have already been subject to stakeholder feedback and revised. The Board is now embarking on the work of scoping, sequencing, and filling in the curricula proper, and aims to publish the curricula after national consultation, in June through September 2010.

Although there has not been a national curriculum in Australia to date, there has already been agreement among the States as to the broad goals of national education, as affirmed by MCEETYA; these include the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians in December 2008, and the 1999 Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century before it. The National Assessment Program, benchmarking student performance in Literacy and Numeracy, has become nationwide in 2008, but national benchmarking of State tests has already been in place for a decade before that. Independently, MCEETYA has adopted nationwide Statements of Learning for English, Maths, Science, Civics, and ICT since 2003, and these have served to bring the State curricula into at least some alignment. So there are already foundations in place for the National Curriculum Board to build on.

Curriculum objectives and outcomes are stated in prose paragraphs. The entire K-10 or K-12 curriculum can end up being quite a weighty book, given the detail to which a student’s thirteen years of education need to be laid out, and even the broad Foundation Statements . By way of comparison, take the examples of mathematics:

• NSW, K-6
• VIC, P-10
• QLD, 3-9

Even the broad, Foundation Statement summaries of desired outcomes are groups of multiple paragraphs per level. Compare:

• NSW Foundation Statements
• VIC, Standards Table [DOC]
• QLD, Assessable elements and descriptors

But as teaching is transformed in the Information Age, the paragraphs need to be leveraged to maximise their use, beyond the realm of PDFs. In particular, teachers will not want to be guided by the curriculum just to plan what they will teach this semester. They will also want help in working out what resources they can use, to teach those curriculum objectives. With the quantity of resources available to them, and increasing all the time, teachers do not expect to have to sift through the descriptions of the resources one by one, to work out which fits the curriculum objectives best. They quite reasonably expect someone to have done so for them already, wherever the resources were registered and their metadata crafted. Given a curriculum objective, they should be able to search for resources which match it.

The expectation that curriculum objectives should drive resource discovery holds, whether there is a national curriculum, or lots of different state curricula. A single set of curriculum objectives makes things much easier for realising such discovery, because resources need to be searchable against only a single set of objectives, rather than eight. But the most critical requirement for resource discovery is not to have a single set of curriculum objectives per country: there is no national curriculum on the horizon for the States, to take the most obvious example. The critical requirement is to have the curriculum objectives be machine readable. Once the paragraphs of learning objectives can be distilled into assertions to tag content with, content can be discovered through those tags.

If those assertions are machine readable, then the capabilities of the Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing can be brought to bear, to automate the tagging of content as much as possible. Making the tagging efficient is in itself a powerful argument for a consistent national curriculum, since it needs only deal with a single authoritative set of assertions about what students should learn. The efficiencies to be gained are obvious for the publishers and registry providers, who make the content available, as well as the teachers and administrators looking for the content.

Machine readable curriculum objectives have been a long running concern of the e-learning community. The disparity between State curricula, and the need to make content searchable against each state’s objectives, led to the development in 2003 of a Curriculum Organiser component, incorporated in the Basic E-Learning Tool Set (BELTS) tool by The Le@rning Federation. The challenge has been particularly acute in the US, as seen, and has led to initiatives like the Gateway to 21st Century Skills and the Achievement Standards Network. The ASN contains, as a resource, all 51 US curricula and several national curricula in machine-readable form. Based on that resource, members of the Gateway network can build tools to better navigate the assertions in resource discovery and learning pathways, as well as curricula. This leads to the paragraphs becoming active and flexible building blocks: they can be sequenced differently, broken down differently, and matched across streams to the same content, leading to more creative and responsive learning.

As the National Curriculum sets about its work of creating a new set of assertions, there is an opportunity to make these assertions dynamic, integrating them into the ICT-driven workflows that enable 21st century learning. This is especially timely with a national curriculum, which can drive the efficiencies required in those ICT-driven workflows most effectively.

Sharing learning content between schools, jurisdictions, sectors—even countries—is an efficiency that makes sense, and is coming to make more and more sense, as there is more content to share, and more people needing content, with less time to write it. Content can be discovered on the open web, through Google, but that kind of discovery is not particularly targeted, quality-controlled, or inclusive. Learning content is normally discovered through repositories, with well-ordered, authoritative, and searchable metadata, rankings and ratings; with established authentication, authorisation and licensing; and all the value adding a controlled environment allows.

That’s all very well if you’re happy to stick to what’s locally available. If you’re not, you need to find out what relevant content there might be in other repositories, which you don’t yet have access to. In fact, even before that, you need to find out which other repositories there is any point in looking for at all. Repository federation, as seen in LORN in the vocational sector, deals with the problem by bringing the other repositories to you (and vice versa).

But there is no one federation of learning content repositories spanning the globe, and there is always something out there that could end up useful; so the problem of finding content elsewhere gets pushed up a level. Even within a federation, the repositories are still autonomously updating and enhancing content, and still need infrastructure to synchronise with each other, and exchange content. And by the time the federations turn into multinational federations of federations, as with the Learning Resource Exchange from European Schoolnet, or the GLOBE alliance, making content exchange scale over large distances and numbers becomes a pressing priority.

Τhe IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange (LODE) project group has been set up to help deal with this kind of issue. It intends to create consistent descriptions of registries of learning content, and services to discover and access such content. Crucially, it concentrates not only on ways of better discovering content through registries, but also on ways of discovering those registries themselves. This depends critically on metadata describing content registries—what kind of content they have, what fields they cover, how frequently they are updated, how their content is licensed. The metadata required to drive that kind of discovery is not a million miles away from how libraries and registries are described in general, and elsewhere we describe how we profiled the ISO 2146 standard for registry services to describe learning content registries under LODE.

• Note: There is an extensive post elsewhere on how European Schoolnet is harnessing the ASPECT project and IMS LODE to meet its goals of making learning content discoverable across the European Union. Link Affiliates are co-chairs of the LODE activity, and have spent a lot of time on repository federation infrastructure as something indispensable to improving education outcomes. (Hence for example the Federated Repositories in Education (FRED), project undertaken in 2007.) An Novermber 2008 summary of LODE work and Link Affiliates’ involvement is also available.

As part of our engagement with LODE, we are testing the CQL Context Set for SRU-based resource search, developed by LODE. We are also doing proof of concept development on using the FRBR model to cluster together search results for different versions, formats and copies of the same learning content. The development work is continuing apace at the USQ Advanced Digital Futures Institute, and the development wiki is publicly accessible.

When putting together the recently released VET e-Portfolio roadmap [PDF], we used the e-Framework as a methodology to describe what types of services/functionality an e-Portfolio system may contain. During the (very long) drafting stage, we presented this view of an e-Portfolio system to a range of different audiences and interested parties in Australia, New Zealand, USA and Europe.

Needless to say it changed a lot during that time, and we went through countless refinements. The standard terminology used in the e-Framework diagram also got pared back a bit. The audience for the e-Portfolio roadmap is not necessarily technical, and we found some people had a bit of difficulty understanding terms like “service genre”. As such we ended up with the following diagram in the roadmap document:

e-portfolio system diagram

The shaded services (authenticate, authorise, annotate and validate) are services that we identified as requiring national collaborative action.

The original draft VET e-Portfolio Service Usage Model (SUM) is still on the e-Framework community wiki. I found it  interesting to look back and see how our thinking has evolved. Originally we divided the business processes into three groups; collect, manage, present. After a lot of discussion and feedback, this grew to 4; source/identify, manage, communicate and present. This is not necessarily so different from other models, however we wanted to show that a learner could identify and use content it without needing to store it in their e-Portfolio. The addition of communicate was an attempt to reflect the often collaborative nature of e-Portfolio creation and use.

Our task now is to finalise the VET e-Portfolio Service Usage Model based on our growing experience.

As in other sectors, schools have long been burdened with the incompatibility of the multiple IT systems used to run their business. The Learning Management Systems, the Student Enrolment Systems, the systems dealing with assessment, pastoral care, attendance, staffing, timetabling—all of these store data about the same students in different ways, and each exports data in its own way. To get the systems to share data between each other has often meant costly custom porting for each pair—where it has not involved printing the data out, and rekeying it from scratch. Waving printouts at a keyboard is not, of course, fulfilling the promise of the paperless office, and it hardly translates to data at one’s fingertips.

The school sector realised quite early (1998) that something could be done about this, and the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) was developed Stateside in response to it. SIF was developed several years before Service-Oriented Architecture started to address similar issues of data incompatibility in industry, but it takes an approach similar enough that it can be stated in SOA terms. Data is exchanged between systems across a common trust environment, using common data structures in XML—just like the Enterprise Service Bus and SOAP of SOA. Systems are able to exchange data because agents translate their native data to the common formats and back again. Data can be pulled in, in a request–response pattern, or pushed out, in a subscription pattern. Unlike SOA, the protocols and common data models are standardised and fixed ahead of time for the school domain, and do not require the systems to be reengineered to fit the system protocols better; so SIF can be layered over existing systems relatively straightforwardly.

The recent trend in the Australian government school sector, and to a growing extent in the Catholic sector, has been to host school systems centrally; this leads to greater efficiencies and security in how data is handled and exchanged, and relieves schools from the burden of having to run systems themselves. However, jurisdictions still have to deal with multiple systems internally, some more centralised than others. They also have occasion to exchange data with other jurisdictions and schools, especially when students move interstate, or in dealing with national testing and benchmarking. Dealing with these issues has made SIF an attractive proposition for the Australian school sector, whether to support the integration of all their internal systems, as is taking place in Victoria, or to provide a consistent outward interface to the data they are authorised to share. This has led to the SIF Association AU initiative, led by representatives from all Australian school systems.

As a relatively lightweight technical architecture, SIF does not particularly depend on where it is deployed, and there have already been several successful deployments of SIF in the UK, in addition to the pilots now underway in Australia. What does need to change from place to place is the model underlying the common data format that the system uses. The original SIF data model deals with the realities of the American school system, so it represents data that makes sense for that context. Because students are provided lunch at school, the logistics of school canteens are a major concern of SIF data modelling, and there are obvious dollar and cent efficiencies in getting the canteen system to talk to the student attendance system. When Australian school systems exchange information, canteen logistics are not a major concern; but getting timetabling right is.

Likewise, the data fields and values captured in SIF reflect American conventions and requirements: they deal in quarters and quinmesters, charter schools, and demographics driven by the American Census and the NCES. The data collected and exchanged in Australian schools needs to reflect Australian requirements, and to conform to Australian norms and conventions. So data is about ESL, not English Proficiency, and the codes for countries and languages are the Australian Bureau of Statistics’. Dealing with these codes in turn means addressing questions such as how many different shades of “Not Applicable” to allow for Yes/No fields, or whether to include both the nodes and the leaves in a hierarchical vocabulary (e.g. whether to allow Netherlandic as a language choice, or only its child nodes, Dutch and Frisian).

Link Affiliates and the ABS, along with members of the SIF-AU data working group, gave feedback on how best to specify the data objects and vocabularies to be used. The SIF-AU draft standard is now being vetted by SIF; meanwhile, pilot projects are underway in several jurisdictions, with an aim to finalise work by the end of the year.

The IMS Global Learning Consortium recently released a white paper about Service Oriented Architecture, as announced on our news page and elsewhere. Service Oriented Architecture is an approach where IT solutions are delivered via small modules or “services”. Such IT services are designed for reuse across a wide range of different IT systems.  For example, many Education systems require information about students. This information can be shared across authorized systems by developing a dedicated service for providing student information. Through the use of services, SOA aims to better align systems with the organisation’s needs by offering more flexible, reusable and reconfigurable solutions or so the theory goes.

There has been a lot of interest in using SOA to manage and plan software systems for education organisations both here in Australia and internationally, which is why we were interested to be involved.

Much of the literature about SOA to date is aimed at the business world and doesn’t address the specific requirements or challenges of education organisations. This IMS SOA white paper is aimed at facilitating greater discussion and adoption of SOA in education by contextualising it to the needs of education organisations. It includes a number of authentic education-specific scenarios including:

• Integration of enterprise applications
• Virtual desktop shared service
• Financial aid
• Learner centred e-portfolios

IBM and Oracle have both had significant involvement in writing this paper. The Link Affiliates team was also involved in editing the document and we contributed the e-portfolio scenario chapter. Link Affiliates’ involvement aside, I would recommended it to anyone wanting to find out more about SOA or may be considering a SOA implementation.

IMS has set up a SOA community forum for people to post comments and feedback on the paper and on the use of SOA approaches in education in general. To date, there hasn’t been much discussion on the forum, but hopefully some interesting conversations can take place once people have had some time to reflect.   An updated version of the paper will be released by the IMS which will take into account comments received by the middle of July.