Linking research & learning technologies through standards

An activity considering “21 Century curriculum content” has recently concluded as part of the DEEWR funded Technical Standards for Digital Education project.

This work focused on two specific aspects of incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into learning and teaching; the nexus between Web 2.0 collaborative functionality and the e-learning content that is already widely used in Australian schools, and the issue of safe use of Web 2.0 functionality.

As with other Technical Standards project activities, this work was undertaken in collaboration with a focus group, which also helped to scope and define the purpose of the work. The term “safe” in particular required further elaboration, with the focus group considering this implied a reasonable level of safety, which addressed duty of care obligations and concerns around young learners online. However, variances in the interpretation of what this might mean in practice reflect the diversity of approaches to technology in schools between and within jurisdictions.

An associated piece of work resulted in the customisation of some existing schools sector focused e-learning content to more closely integrate Web 2.0 collaborative functionality. This activity investigated a relatively new IMS specification called Common Cartridge, as explained in a previous blog post. A survey was also undertaken with focus group members, and the following technical challenges were identified:

• Network and firewall barriers
• Professional development for teachers
• Assessing and selecting appropriate tools for use with learners
• Understanding and managing security and duty of care requirements
• Access and identity management.

The resulting report outlines the findings of activity, and also points to some useful resources for facilitating the integration of Web 2.0 collaborative tools with learners. A number of recommendations for further work have also been made in the report.

As part of the Technical Standards in Digital Education project, the Link Affiliates team and e-Works have recently been working on some demonstrator e-learning content (see our previous blog post for background information) using a fairly new specification called IMS Common Cartridge.

The IMS Common Cartridge (IMS CC) specification was developed by IMS Global as a way of packaging and deploying e-learning content. Rather than being a completely new specification, IMS CC actually uses a number of existing IMS specifications and provides more prescriptive information on their implementation to give more certainty to software developers and implementers of the specification. We’ve been exploring IMS CC as a way of incorporating collaborative Web 2.0 functionality and services with e-learning content.

We are now winding up our development work and are starting to reflect on what we’ve learnt from the experience. In general, this experience has been quite positive. The documentation seems quite user-friendly, and there is a collection of example IMS CC content available to “CC Alliance” members on the IMS Global website.

A big challenge for the IMS CC specification at the moment is software tool support. With a new specification, vendors often seem to hold off on implementing it until they see that there is enough market acceptance. However content creators aren’t going to use a specification if it is not widely adopted by vendors, which can result in a stand-off.

In the case of IMS CC, there are a growing number of tools that support the creation of Common Cartridges including eXe, MIR Common Cartridge System and Common Cartridge Builder. The ASPECT project is documenting information on tool support for IMS CC, and we found their information was useful. As we were working with existing SCORM content, we also used the SCORM2CC conversion tool, which was effective and easy to use. In general, although the freely available tools for creating IMS CC content are improving, our developer found it sometimes easier to edit the underlying XML code directly. If the IMS CC specification starts to get traction in Australia, a more detailed evaluation of the available tools for non-technical users will need to be undertaken.

For testing IMS CC content, IMS provides a Test System which performs a similar function to the ADL Test Suite for SCORM content. We found the Test System to be very useful, as it tests the content against the IMS schemas as well as running a number of other checks (defined as Schematron rules). The error messages do require some knowledge of the specification.

Support for playing/executing IMS CC content is still somewhat limited, but the list of Learning Management Systems (LMS) that support IMS CC is growing. Moodle 1.9+ (with a patch), Moodle 2.0 and Atutor have support for IMS CC content. Blackboard has been slower to provide support for the specification, but recently confirmed it’s commitment to supporting IMS CC.

We are currently documenting our outcomes from this project and will be publishing a report with recommendations for further work before the middle of the year.