Linking research & learning technologies through standards

The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS) is a global, nonprofit, member association that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning and educational technology industries through collaborative support of standards, innovation, best practice and recognition of superior learning impact.  IMS holds quarterly meetings for members and recently held its third quarterly meeting for 2010. Key topics on the agenda included:

• Learning Objects Discovery and Exchange (LODE)
• Question and Test Interoperability
• Learning Tools Interoperability
• Digital Learning Services

In addition, there were sessions on:

• ASPECT Project: Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content.
• The ICOPER Reference Model: Interoperability for a new Higher Education.
• LODE in OpenScout and MACE
• Educational Change and Collaboration in the IMS GLC

A number of the IMS working groups are of immediate and direct relevance to work underway supporting our national initiatives in Australia, particularly related to the national curriculum, curriculum mapping, and digital resources (content) authoring, discovery and exchange, and implementation of national infrastructure and services.

In the general sessions, IMS outlined its Digital Learning Services and the importance of that strategy to it and to education. Digital Learning Services is underpinned by three core areas of IMS’ work.  These being:

• IMS Common Cartridge
• IMS Learning Tools Interoperability
• IMS Learning Information Services

In addition to the general sessions I attended a number of the specialist working group meetings – the two of most direct relevance were the LODE meeting and the LTI meeting.

LODE (Learning Object Discovery and Exchange)

The LODE specification aims to facilitate the discovery and retrieval of learning objects stored across more than one collection. LODE can be seen as a glue specification that profiles existing general-purpose protocols in order to take into account requirements specific to the educational domain, rather than creating new protocols. It proposes three main data models:

• A LODE Context Set for the Contextual Query Language (CQL): a data model for the attributes of learning objects, which can be used for search by expressing educationally meaningful queries;
• A data model, named Information for Learning Object eXchange (ILOX), that organizes sets of metadata on learning objects to be used in data exchange; and
• A data model, named Learning Object Repository Registry Data Model, for learning object collections, to be used in discovering and configuring access to those collections.

The work of the LODE group is particularly important to Australia as we seek to improve the discoverability of and access to content and services that will support the national curriculum.  In addition to simply discovering resources from repositories, those resources will need to be mapped to specific parts of the curriculum and curriculum outcomes.  Link Affiliates has been an active participant in the development of the LODE specification and instrumental in its development.

The ILOX model was presented and agreement sought on work to date and work to do on the specification of this model.  ILOX allows us to describe multiple contexts of learning content.  For example, a resource could be manifested in different formats, presented in different languages, have different rights associated with it, accessibility multiple versions etc.

LODE profiles a number of specifications to support the discovery and exchange of learning content and continues to refine the approach to support emerging and best practice.  Another technology/specification that is gathering momentum in this area is that of the Semantic Web, and in particular the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework).  RDF describes the relationships between resources and potentially has a great deal to offer in this area.  Diny Golder of JES & Co, outlined the work of the Global Learning Resource Connection (GLRC) and how it is using RDF to increase the discoverability of learning content.  ESA (Education Services Australia, with support from Link Affiliates), in conjunction with JES & Co has been investigating the use of RDF and the Semantic Web to improve search and discovery.  The LODE working group has been monitoring this work through IMS, who have announced a collaboration and has agreed to investigate the potential for incorporating this approach into the LODE specification.

The working group also agreed on developing a best practice document for LODE.  Such documents are seen as invaluable to new implementers of specifications, who largely prefer to work from existing examples and documentation than interpreting full specifications.

LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability)

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is one of the three core areas of IMS Digital Learning Services – the others being Common Cartridge and Learning Information Services.  LTI provides the bridge between formal learning environments (such as LMS’s) and Web 2.0 services and digital content.  LTI opens up the education environment to many new services and resources.  It is an important specification for the Australian education environment as it allows external services and content (eg national services, resources, Web 2.0 services and content etc) to be integrated into formal education environments in a safe and secure manner.

In LTI, a learning platform such as a Learning Management System (LMS) is known as a tool consumer (TC) ie it consumes content or services from the Web.  The provider of those services or content is known as a tool provider (TP).

The LTI working group looked at a number of aspects of the specification.  The certification process was discussed in detail.

The current release of LTI is known as Basic LTI. It simply allows an external tool to be launched from the LMS.  It also addresses authorisation using OAuth, an open specification for supporting authorization.  Basic LTI does not support data flowing back to the LMS from the TP.  To do this requires full LTI.  The release of the full LTI specification is still some way of as there are a number of complex issues to address.  The LTI working group is working on this.

To test their approach, IMS is working on an implementation known as Basic LTI Simple Outcomes.  This implementation was a focus of much of the workshop.  Simple Outcomes allows for a result to be passed back from the TP to the LMS and stored in (for example) the Gradebook.

Basic LTI Simple Outcomes will not be released as a specification – it will only be made available to IMS members.  This is consistent with the manner in which specifications are being developed and released by IMS now.  IMS will be releasing in smaller increments of functionality and working very collaboratively on the development and implementations of its specifications.  Experience has shown that it is difficult for vendors, integrators etc to work with large, complex specifications so IMS seems to be evolving its approach to developing specifications – small, lightweight and easy to implement.  Basic LTI and Basic LTI Simple Outcomes follow this philosophy.

One of the areas that I was interested in from our own experience with Basic LTI, was the type of information that can be returned to the LMS with Basic LTI Simple Outcomes.  Result information can be quite complex and there are multiple result types (eg grade, pass/fail information, scores (of which there are many sub-types) etc).  ‘Simple Outcomes’ deals with passing information back to the LMS that can be included in a ‘grade-book’ so it is restricted on the types of information it can send.  The LTI team has limited the types of results that can be returned so that they can prove the approach, then build on it.  The full implementation of LTI will contain a lot more sophistication.