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.

The Technical Standards for Digital Education project’s accessibility activity was primarily focused on investigating the potential impact of new web accessibility guidelines on schools sector e-learning content.  In December 2008, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released a new version of the de facto international standard for web accessibility called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). In response, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) in consultation with The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) undertook a consultation process with government departments during 2009 in preparation for a transition to WCAG 2.0 as a government requirement for web content. A transition timetable was released in 2010.

The implementation of the new accessibility requirements should bring benefits for learners accessing web and e-learning content in schools. However, there will need to be support provided to web content developers, teachers and IT staff in order to facilitate the transition.

Within this context, the aim of our accessibility work was as follows:

• Build capability and assist the schools sector to understand the potential impact, challenges and opportunities WCAG 2.0 could present for the Australian schools sector
• Provide advice to DEEWR relating to AGIMO WCAG 2.0 consultations

In collaboration with a dedicated focus group, we investigated potential implications, current trends and barriers to accessibility of web content. In addition, the activity converted some existing e-learning content to comply to WCAG 2.0 requirements to gain a practical understanding of the potential challenges. All of these findings as well as recommendations for further action for Australian governments have been documented in the final report.

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 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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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 »

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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