Linking research & learning technologies through standards

As part of our recent wrap-up of a bunch of projects, Link Affiliates has been reflecting on the impact of technical standards on education. One measure of success is when educators and learners do not know that the standards are there – what they are doing just works. A side-effect of this measure is that it is sometimes hard to establish new technical standards projects: it is difficult to justify spending time and money on things which nobody sees. For these reasons, we recently wrote a brief article providing examples of how technical standards have been directly beneficial to Australian digital education initiatives.

Scenario

The article takes a look at what educators are able to do now compared to just a few years ago and examines how that has been achieved using technical standards. It uses a scenario where a teacher wishes to find content for use in a class, adapt it to meet local needs and share that content with peers. The teacher creates and shares assessments relevant to the learning activity. Students produce content as part of the learning activity and share the content as evidence of their capability using e-portfolios.


This relatively simple sequence of events is a highly plausible scenario in a 21st Century learning environment and parts of it are already taking place in Australian education institutions.

Existing standards

The article goes on to describe the standards that have been used to implement parts of the scenario in various Australian education sectors:

• Content discovery: Content can be discovered in schools and VET sector classrooms through state and national portals due to use of Learning Object Metadata (LOM) to describe learning content, use of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to collect those descriptions, and use of Search/Retrieve by URL (SRU) and OpenSearch to search content collections
• Adapt / Use / Publish Content: Learning content produced by national and state based projects in the schools and VET sector can be distributed, used and adapted in classrooms due to conformance to a number of specifications, including IMS Content Packaging, ADL SCORM, W3C XHTML and W3C CSS specifications. Learning content produced by national schools and VET sector projects can be used by learners with a range of abilities and disabilities due to conformance to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Licences to use and adapt the content are increasingly being encoded using Creative Commons and AESharenet online licences.
• Assess: The IMS Question & Test Interoperability Specification has been used as the basis for the Global Education website provided through AusAid, and TAFE Tasmania’s iQTI and GURU mobile assessment systems. The Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) is being trialled as a mechanism for sharing student outcomes in the schools sectors.has been trialled in the schools sector.
• Share evidence: The IMS ePortfolio specification has been an important reference specification for the development and design of ePortfolio applications. It has been used by DEEWR funded MyFuture portal. SIF is being trialled as a mechanism for sharing student outcomes in the schools sectors.

Additionally, standards such as SIF and LDAP are being used to provision information on students and teachers into Australian online learning environments.

Emerging standards

Although parts of the scenario above are already deployed in Australian education, learning technology is a rapidly developing area. A number of standards are currently in development internationally or are being deployed in Australian education projects to better support and even extend the scenario:

(See the full article for more detail on how these relate to the scenario)

Reflections

Effective standards are never seen by teaching and learning practitioners, but are essential for supporting 21st century teaching and learning. They open up more potential for innovation and create opportunities to provide richer, more meaningful environments. Our hope is that the examples described above give policy makers a feel for the direct and real impact that technical standards work has on digital education. Australian standards analysts have contributed to the development, adoption and adaptation of many of these specifications. It would be a pity not to value and support their input into the development of Australian digital education initiatives.