Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Late in 2009 Education Service Australia (ESA) handed Link Affiliates an interesting brief: to write an executive level briefing on the semantic web approach to machine readable curriculum that they had been piloting in collaboration with the Achievement Standards Network (ASN).

Although we’d been working with ESA and ASN on machine readable curriculum for quite a while as part of our Technical Standards for Digital Education project , this brief was still quite daunting: explaining technical approaches to executives is never easy; explaining a semantic web approach to education executives even more so. We persevered, however, and in May published a paper called “Benefits of Machine Readable Curriculum” on our website. The paper describes ASN’s approach to imposing a lightweight and flexible structure over curriculum documents, and how that structure can support a bunch of simple, but high impact, use cases such as discovering content based on curriculum outcomes, and charting student progress with respect to a curriculum. Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL) recently convened a Learning Content Registries and Repositories summit (#ADLRR2010) in Alexandria, Va., which Link Affiliates attended. (We have already posted here our position paper for the meeting.)

ADL have been pioneers in developing and disseminating e-learning content; the ADL-Registry and its underlying model CORDRA have been highly influential since their inception in 2003. However the way information is disseminated and consumed online has changed greatly in the six years since, and the expectations of users have changed along with them. The summit was convened to ask:

• What has happened in the last 6+ years?
• What are the current business drivers and requirements?
• What is the state of practice in registries and repositories for learning content?
• What are the outstanding business and policy issues?
• What are the outstanding technical issues?
• What should we (the broader learning, educational, training, repositories and registries communities) be doing?

The summit was arranged as a sequence of panels, with audience questions. The panels reflected perspectives from US Government agencies, repository initiatives, technical interoperability, Web 2.0 and Semantic Web, and content vendors. The summit also included two breakout sessions, on what the current status and problems are in the learning repository space, and on what future priorities for development should be.

I’ve taken blow by blow notes of the workshop at the Interoppo Research blog; ADL has also provided links to other blog posts and tweets discussing the summit, as well as position papers requested for the summit. The summit ended with a polyphony of opinions on what to do next. Looking back, however, there are some clear realisations running through the summit; these have been picked up by Dan Rehak and Damon Regan in their summaries (Rehak: PPT, Regan: PDF), and are consistent with the findings of the subsequent CETISROW event (see Phil Barker’s summary).

This is my own skewed summary of what the summit found:

• We don’t need more standards.
• We do need a lot to seek out much more feedback from our users: what problems are we trying to solve?
• The users don’t come to us, they go to Google (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr).
• We won’t beat Google (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr) at their own game, and should not try to.
  • They build on Open Web content, we should provide Open Web content.
  • They harness content through Open Web standards (as does the Semantic Web): we should expose content through Open Web standards.
  • They set user expectations on discovery; we should break those expectations only if what we do is visibly better.
• We have unique value as repositories, as authoritative & targeted providers of content. We should promote this—via Open Web channels.
• We have defined contexts for interacting with content, and means of gathering user contextual data. That contributes to our unique value: better targeted search, or content push anticipating search.
• Get metadata from wherever you can (automated, user-provided): users already deal with bad metadata every day, and bad metadata is still better than no metadata.
• Repository federations are growing, but depend on harmonisation and registry metadata (and still coexist with Google).

The following is a more detailed summary.
Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the Technical Standards in Digital Education project, the Link Affiliates team and e-Works have recently been working on some demonstrator e-learning content (see our previous blog post for background information) using a fairly new specification called IMS Common Cartridge.

The IMS Common Cartridge (IMS CC) specification was developed by IMS Global as a way of packaging and deploying e-learning content. Rather than being a completely new specification, IMS CC actually uses a number of existing IMS specifications and provides more prescriptive information on their implementation to give more certainty to software developers and implementers of the specification. We’ve been exploring IMS CC as a way of incorporating collaborative Web 2.0 functionality and services with e-learning content.

We are now winding up our development work and are starting to reflect on what we’ve learnt from the experience. In general, this experience has been quite positive. The documentation seems quite user-friendly, and there is a collection of example IMS CC content available to “CC Alliance” members on the IMS Global website.

A big challenge for the IMS CC specification at the moment is software tool support. With a new specification, vendors often seem to hold off on implementing it until they see that there is enough market acceptance. However content creators aren’t going to use a specification if it is not widely adopted by vendors, which can result in a stand-off.

In the case of IMS CC, there are a growing number of tools that support the creation of Common Cartridges including eXe, MIR Common Cartridge System and Common Cartridge Builder. The ASPECT project is documenting information on tool support for IMS CC, and we found their information was useful. As we were working with existing SCORM content, we also used the SCORM2CC conversion tool, which was effective and easy to use. In general, although the freely available tools for creating IMS CC content are improving, our developer found it sometimes easier to edit the underlying XML code directly. If the IMS CC specification starts to get traction in Australia, a more detailed evaluation of the available tools for non-technical users will need to be undertaken.

For testing IMS CC content, IMS provides a Test System which performs a similar function to the ADL Test Suite for SCORM content. We found the Test System to be very useful, as it tests the content against the IMS schemas as well as running a number of other checks (defined as Schematron rules). The error messages do require some knowledge of the specification.

Support for playing/executing IMS CC content is still somewhat limited, but the list of Learning Management Systems (LMS) that support IMS CC is growing. Moodle 1.9+ (with a patch), Moodle 2.0 and Atutor have support for IMS CC content. Blackboard has been slower to provide support for the specification, but recently confirmed it’s commitment to supporting IMS CC.

We are currently documenting our outcomes from this project and will be publishing a report with recommendations for further work before the middle of the year.

Link Affiliates will be participating in the ADL Learning Content Registries and Repositories Summit, to be held in Washington DC on April 13-14 2010:

There have been numerous learning content registry and repository projects. This summit aims to bring together participants to determine “where are we” and “what’s next” for learning content registries and repositories, dealing with business, policy and technical issues. The summit is targeted to those who develop, deploy or use registries and repositories to manage and deliver learning content along with users who develop and publish learning content or want to find it.

Rather than just submitting a position paper to the summit, we thought we would share our thoughts here on some of the trends we see happening in repositories and repository federation: the Googlification of repositories, open interfaces, repository mandate and user needs, and registry-of-registry approaches to repository federation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst we still need to wait for the Australian Human Rights Commission’s (AHRC) advice and the Australian Government Information Management Office’s (AGIMO) Transition Strategy on adopting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), the vocational education and training sector (VET) has been considering the specific implications for e-learning content development and use.

In VET we’ve been looking at WCAG 2.0 within the context of current content creation processes and practices so that we can estimate the likely effect of transitioning to 2.0.  In 2009, the group responsible for ratification of technical standards for use in the VET sector, the E-standards Expert Group (EEG), commissioned Roger Hudson to undertake an evaluation of WCAG 2.0 and the requirements for transitioning from current processes and practice to meet WCAG 2.0.

The resulting report identified that migration from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 is likely to be relatively straightforward for content creators who understand WCAG 1.0 (although there may be more complexity where there is accessibility-supported use of some technologies) and allowed the EEG to make a submission to AGIMO on behalf of the sector (an initial recommendation of WCAG 2.0 Level AA with accessibility supported use of Flash, JavaScript and PDF for development of new content).

Significantly, the research also highlighted gaps in content creator basic understanding of accessibility and correspondingly WCAG 1.0. Whilst this was a not  unexpected result, given that a significant amount of the content is produced by teachers who are not web professionals, it may mean that the migration to WCAG 2.0 would be less straight-forward than we’d hope.  It also means that in VET, like the other education sectors, we need to recognise that there is a large back-catalogue of uncompliant content.

Identifying and recognising that the challenge for the VET sector is not just content creators understanding WCAG 2.0 has meant that we have not been hamstrung while the government  and AHRC discuss where they’ll go with WCAG 2.0.  We are now certain that content creators need not only the technical knowledge that will allow them to successfully build accessible content, but also an understanding of why they need to make content accessible from the perspective of legality and equity.

While AGIMO transition plan is being formulated and AHRC are considering their stance we’ll be working to increase the knowledge, skill-level and understanding of VET content creators  so that they have the capacity to build accessible content regardless of of the technology.   We hope that between now and 2012 we can equip VET content creators with the skills to make use of the extensive supporting documentation for WCAG 2.0 and that they can benefit from the  more readily testable techniques and examples of what will satisfy the success criteria.

We’ll also be following up with AGIMO and AHRC and feeding information about the volume of educational content that already exists into the transition discussions, in the hope that the scope of the strategy will take into account  the scale of maintenance and the work effort that would be required if the requirements were to be applied retrospectively.