Linking research & learning technologies through standards

The Link Affiliates team in collaboration with e-Works are currently working on some schools-based e-learning content to explore emerging trends and influences affecting content. This work is part of the DEEWR funded Technical Standards for Digital Education project. There are two particular aspects to this work:

• Integration and use of collaborative Web 2.0 type technologies with e-learning content appropriate for use in Australian schools
• Exploring the potential impact and challenges for the Australian schools sector from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 specification (for more information on WCAG 2.0, refer to Kristena Gladman’s recent post).

To facilitate this work, The Learning Federation has kindly provided us with small number of e-learning resources to work with.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

We will be modifying the content to align it with WCAG 2.0 guidelines to gain a practical understanding of what this entails and how this might differ from current best practice. Exploring what WCAG 2.0 means in practice to different types of content including Adobe Flash, and identifying the availability of WCAG 2.0 related implementation information and how useful this is to developers.

IMS Common Cartridge

The content will be packaged using the recent IMS Common Cartridge (IMS CC) specification, which is a method for packaging and deploying e-learning content. This specification has a few features we are planning to explore to embed collaborative services/functionality, and to facilitate access control. We are also wanting to determine how much practical software support exists for the IMS CC specification and what this means to users.

Outcomes

This content will be demonstrated to the Technical Standards for Digital Education project’s focus groups at a face to face meeting to coincide with the IDEA10 conference in mid March. We are hoping to also make some or all of this content publicly available pending copyright clearance soon after this demonstration.

With Australian interest in the release of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), web accessibility has emerged as a hot topic for 2009/2010. The Link Affiliates team are planning a series of blog posts from a range of interested parties on the topic of web accessibility to find out what’s happening in Australian education.

This series kicks off with a brief overview of the WCAG 2.0 specification and Australian government web accessibility requirements from Kristena Gladman. Kristena works at e-Works where she has coordinated an investigation into the impact of WCAG 2.0 on the Vocational Education and Training Sector. She has also previously worked on the Curriculum Corporation’s “The Learning Federation” project.

Accessibility can be loosely defined as the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is readily available to all users. Accessible web design should ensure that all users can access the content regardless of their location, experience or type of computer technology – particularly users with disabilities.  Web content designed without consideration of accessibility will often have access issues for people with disabilities or technological limitations.  Whilst accessibility of web content is often aligned with catering to disabled users there are significant benefits for the majority of users if content is accessible.

The need for web accessibility is recognised internationally in United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In Australia the provision of accessible web content, like equitable access to buildings, education, employment, public transport and goods and services, is covered by the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) which is administered by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).

In practice, these provisions mean that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a requirement, particularly for publicly funded web content.
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In a previous blog post we discussed a demonstration of the emerging IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification. The demonstration used IMS LIS to share learner and course information between a student information system (Campus Solutions) and learning environments (SAKAI, facebook, beehive):

LIS demonstration

In this post, we’ll reflect on the architecture Oracle used to implement the demonstration, and compare it with how the Schools Interoperability Framework might solve the same problem.

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