Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Can learners benefit from access to their qualifications data? Can learner controlled, electronic access to attainment data improve learner transition in and out of the vocational training sector?

Link Affiliates examined these questions in a report prepared for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework’s e-Portfolio business activity. The Verifying VET Learner Attainment Data report (PDF) was based on an investigation of existing learner verification services and a survey of possible consumers of verified learner information in the Australian VET sector. While the report found that accessing verified learner information is in its infancy in many ways, there is a cohort of information consumers who would find this information useful, and a number of possible models that could be investigated further.
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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.

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Late last year Link Affiliates carried out some research for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework’s E-Standards for Training business activity to

identify and document the potential applications of a trust federation approach in the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector

We were asked to create use cases (scenarios) that clarify the benefits of a VET trust federation, and to identify appropriate technologies for each scenario (the research brief recognised that different technologies might be appropriate for different scenarios).

The resulting analysis identified a number of VET services that could benefit from a trust federation, but also uncovered a complex trust environment with overlapping identity and service providers, and found that no single technology was appropriate for all of the use cases. This post summarises of our findings. Check out the report on the E-standards for Training website for full details … Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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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The IMS Global quarterly meeting for late 2009 was hosted by Oracle at their Redwood City campus in California. During the meeting, Oracle and their partners gave a nice demonstration of systems integration using the emerging Learning Information Services specification.

About the LIS specification

The IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification supports

sharing of learner and course information between Student Information Systems and Learning Environments

It supersedes the previous IMS specification in this space (IMS Enterprise) that specified data formats for exchanging learning information between systems. LIS takes things a step further: as well as specifying data formats, it defines services for exchanging and synchronising student and course information between systems. This represents a new direction for IMS specifications: a shift toward a service oriented approach (soa) rather than a data oriented approach to system integration.

The LIS specification is large. It defines hundreds of operations in six services for managing updates to data about people, groups, memberships, courses, outcomes. It also has a bulk data exchange service that supports bulk provisioning of information between systems. Most of the services are defined using an IMS profile of the WS-I suite of specifications (WSDL, SOAP). There are also an LDAP binding for some of the services, and talk of REST-ful bindings in future versions.

An implementation of the specification is not required to support each and every service. Neither is an implementation required to support each and every operation. Rather, it is expected that communities will define profiles of the specification and implement those.

The demonstration

The demonstration itself involved an implementation of a higher education profile of the LIS specification. In the demonstration, Oracle used its Campus Solutions to manage information about students, course offerings, classes, grades etc in a mythical college. The product was essentially used as “single source of truth” for student and course information. Read the rest of this entry »

Reflections on e-Humanities workshop, Melbourne e-Research Scholarship Centre, 2009-08-12

Building generic ICT infrastructure to support humanities research seems to be a difficult task. The standard approach is to

1. collect a bunch of usage stories from different communities
2. infer common business processes based on those stories
3. build infrastructure that supports those business processes

The theory is that a community would then take the generic infrastructure and customise it to meet their particular needs. The problem is that there is something about the humanities that makes generic business processes hard to find.

We’ve blogged previously about the Project Bamboo approach to finding generic e-Humanities business processes. Project Bamboo certainly had difficulty converting its scholarly narratives into common recipes. Maybe there aren’t any processes common to the different strands of humanities research? Unlikely. Rather, the fierce independence of humanities researchers makes it difficult to infer commonalities. Suggesting to a humanities researcher that she might have a research process in common with her peers carries with it an inference that her research is not unique. Even uttering the phrase “business process”  can put humanities researchers offside (some of them conflate business and commerce).

In this context, there was a little nervousness leading up to the Interconnections and Services in the eHumanities: Reflecting on Current Initiatives workshop hosted by the University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre on 12 August.
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Hi, and welcome to the Link Affiliates Blog.  A place were you’ll be hearing about our team’s thoughts on international e-learning and e-research interoperability and standards activities.

But, before we go there, I thought I’d tackle the really big question of …

Why a Link Affiliates blog?

Link Affiliates team members have been providing interoperability and technical advice to the Australian education community since the mid 1990′s. Traditionally, we have provided this advice directly to projects and consultative groups like LORN, The Le@rning Federation, the e-Framework …

We’ve always known that the conversations and experiences we share with these projects deserved to be shared more broadly through a forum like a blog, but have never done anything about it, until now …

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