Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Link Affiliates has been working this year on supporting the Digital Education Revolution, through the Technical Standards for Digital Education project. This project aims to enhance IT system support for the range of teaching and learning possible in the digital world, and works with the Australian school education community to create technical standards relevant to the Australian schools digital environment. The project will also provide mechanisms for the Australian school education community to influence the development of global technical standards.

The project is split into seven themed activities; further descriptions of the activities are available at the Link Affiliates web site. Because we blog about our work on the project, we have up a tag for each of the activities, which you can use to track them:

21st Century Curriculum Content: 21C Curriculum Content

Support schools sector use of “safe” web 2.0 content

Engage with W3C Accessibility Guidelines: Accessibility Guidelines

Build capability and assist the schools sector to understand the potential impact, challenges and opportunities the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) could present for the Australian schools sector

Curriculum description: Curriculum Description

Support schools sector uses of machine readable curriculum descriptions

Lesson Plans: Lesson Plans

Support schools sector sharing of lesson plans

Learning Content Discovery and Exchange: Learning Content Discovery & Exchange

Support discovery and exchange of learning content between school sector systems

e-Portfolios technology: e-portfolio

Articulate key technical interoperability challenges for e-portfolios in the Australian schools sector and propose future work on e-Portfolio interoperability in the schools sector

Integrated Learning Environments and 21st Century Learning: Integrated Learning Environments

Support the SIF-AU project and articulate web 2.0 and service oriented approaches to integrating learning environments

We have already discussed our development activities around the IMS LODE activity for discovery of learning objects. However, what we have described so far presupposes that learning object descriptions are already available to a user, because the user can access those descriptions in their local repository, or through a repository federation they have access to.

But there will not in the foreseeable future be a Super-Federation of all education repositories in the world, nor indeed does there need to be. Rather than unleashing users on all e-learning repositories in the world, it makes more sense for users to discover learning object collections that they don’t already have access to—but which are of direct interest to them. So users should be able to target their searches for content to the collections which will pay off, instead of doing an inefficient, iterative blanket search across Everything.
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Over the last few months, the Australian Digital Futures Institute has been working with Link Affiliates to test the specifications coming out of the IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange activity. We have already posted about our testing work; now that our work is wrapping up, this is a summary of what we have done. This post goes into the work done on discovery of individual learning objects.

DEEWR has funded Link Affiliates to participate in the IMS activity on behalf of the Australian schools sector, with the aim to facilitate discovery and retrieval of learning content from repositories, by profiling standards for searching and harvesting learning content, and learning content repositories. That leads to better use and reuse of available resources in the domain, and is one of the areas prioritised by the Digital Education Revolution. Our main partners in the activity have been European Schoolnet, which is pursuing large-scale exchange of objects between repositories through the ASPECT project (see more details), and TÉLUQ, the distance education arm of the Université de Québec à Montréal.

The issues IMS LODE is seeking to address involve both search queries and search results.
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