Linking research & learning technologies through standards

The Integrated Learning environments and 21st Century Learning activity within the Technical Standards for Digital Education project, led by Nick Nicholas, was set up to promote better integration of systems in the school sector. This includes both administrative systems and learning environments; it encompasses systems within the school and jurisdiction intranet, vertical reporting, and the Open Web (collaboration systems, content repositories).

There were two distinct components to this activity, addressing distinct initiatives to improve integration.

• One component involved participating in the SIF Association AU Data Standards Working Group. SIF AU was set up to promote interoperability throughout Australia between jurisdiction and school systems. While there is interest in extending its use to learning systems (SIF Instructional Services), the priority to date has been integrating administrative systems.
• The second component looked at integrating learning systems, and in particular the challenges of integration with Web 2.0 and Service-Oriented systems.

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The Curriculum Description activity within the Technical Standards for Digital Education project, led by Nick Nicholas, was set up to support school sector uses of standards-compliant, machine-readable curriculum descriptions. The need for curricula to be machine-readable is driven by the digital context in which the curriculum is now used: lessons and assessment are now planned, and learning resources discovered, online. The multiple sources and forms of learning resources, and the multiple markets adressed by learning content providers, present a challenge of mapping multiple jurisdictions’ curricula to multiple resources, to varying degrees of granularity: any machine-readable approach must be able to cope with this level of complexity. Teachers and admnistrators also expect to be able to map between curricula, as students are increasingly mobile, and to formulate alternate structures and pathways through curricula.

The activity was explicitly set up to support making the new Australian National Curriculum machine-readable, and to make it possible to map between the National Curriculum and the existing State curricula. Because of this specific focus, the activity was aligned with a pilot project undertaken by the Curriculum Corporation (now Education Services Australia) on making Australian curricula machine-readable. The activity provided technical analysis and feedback to the project. Because of the nature of the pilot and its well-defined scope, it was not appropriate to embark in separate requirements gathering outside the existing project; so this activity did not involve a focus group, unlike the other Technical Standards activities.
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The Technical Standards for Digital Education project which Link Affiliates has been involved with, as part of the Digital Education Revolution, is now concluding, and we are publishing the reports from the seven activities in the project on the Link Affiliates website. On the blog, we will summarise what each activity has achieved, in collaboration with our focus groups.

The Learning Content Discovery & Exchange activity, led by Nigel Ward, was intended to deal with the challenges of discovering learning content in current school landscape. Curriculum content comes from multiple sources—including the Web, publishers, jurisdictions, and cultural agencies; it is hosted in multiple places; and it is exchanged both within and between jurisdictions. To deal with this complexity, the activity was set up to:

• identify the technical requirements for discovery and exchange across school repositories and portals, and advise on standards support for those requirements;
• feed input from the school sector to discovery and exchange standards under development.

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SIF Association AU recently held a two day workshop for the Data Standards Working Group, which has been working for the past couple of years on the Australian data model and specification for SIF. These are some of the highlights of the meeting:

New SIF Association US Standard

SIF Implementation Specification 2.4 is going to be released in early June; a preview of the features to be included is already available. (See also Larry Fruth’s presentation (PPT) at the recent IDEA10 event.) The new release of SIF features new objects and attributes, including improved coverage of assessment and its alignment to curricula, and objects to support special programmes for staff and students (student participation, professional development). But there are two major additions in this version taking SIF in new directions.
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Last month, ISO released the long-awaited third edition of the ISO 2146 standard for Registry services for libraries and related organisations. ISO 2146 is a standard of great interest to repository communities, and we have already posted on it at some length, including its use as a basis for the Australian National Data Service’s RIF-CS schema, and the IMS LODE registry model. (The latter post includes a UML diagram of the ISO 2146 classes as of its 2008 draft.) Because of this interest, it is worth describing the standard further.
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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.
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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.

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The Global Registries Initiative (GRI) is a collaboration between the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) and counterparts in the UK (IESR) and USA (OCKHAM Project). The initiative aims to make it easier to discover research data and publications stored in disciplinary and institutional repositories. It will do so by centrally registering national registries of research data, and the service points for interacting with those registries. Clients can then be configured automatically to search across all registered service points: the registries are formed into an ad hoc federation, which can be used by aggregators, mash-ups and portals, to improve access to scientific resources wherever they are stored.

GRI’s goals are consistent with those of ANDS, which aims to improve access to Australian research by gathering descriptions of research data collections from projects and institutions throughout the country, and making them available for search through a central portal. GRI extends the scope of discovery, by federating registries that do what ANDS is doing in Australia—just as a repository federation makes the content of all its repositories discoverable, without the content of the repositories necessarily being stored in the one central spot.
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We have discussed in the previous post SRU as a remote search protocol, and how it seeks to be broadly applicable by abstracting search indexes away from their native metadata formats. The new OASIS SWS (Search Web Services) standard, which is intended as the successor to SRU, goes further: it also abstracts search parameters away from the search protocol. SWS pursues interoperability between different search protocols, by abstracting to a common protocol model, of which actual search protocols are treated as bindings.
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We have mentioned in previous posts that our work with IMS LODE, among other goals, sought to profile search across different e-learning repositories, so as to be interoperable. But there is a diversity of schemas for educational metadata which such search needs to traverse (at a minimum, IEEE LOM, Dublin Core for Education, and ISO MLR), and an even greater diversity of profiles for those schemas. If different repositories use different schemas, how can search across multiple different repositories remain interoperable?

The solution we have adopted is to use a search protocol, SRU, which abstracts away from the specific schemas used in a domain, to the search terms of interest across the domain.
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