Linking research & learning technologies through standards

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.