Linking research & learning technologies through standards

We have already discussed our development activities around the IMS LODE activity for discovery of learning objects. However, what we have described so far presupposes that learning object descriptions are already available to a user, because the user can access those descriptions in their local repository, or through a repository federation they have access to.

But there will not in the foreseeable future be a Super-Federation of all education repositories in the world, nor indeed does there need to be. Rather than unleashing users on all e-learning repositories in the world, it makes more sense for users to discover learning object collections that they don’t already have access to—but which are of direct interest to them. So users should be able to target their searches for content to the collections which will pay off, instead of doing an inefficient, iterative blanket search across Everything.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few months, the Australian Digital Futures Institute has been working with Link Affiliates to test the specifications coming out of the IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange activity. We have already posted about our testing work; now that our work is wrapping up, this is a summary of what we have done. This post goes into the work done on discovery of individual learning objects.

DEEWR has funded Link Affiliates to participate in the IMS activity on behalf of the Australian schools sector, with the aim to facilitate discovery and retrieval of learning content from repositories, by profiling standards for searching and harvesting learning content, and learning content repositories. That leads to better use and reuse of available resources in the domain, and is one of the areas prioritised by the Digital Education Revolution. Our main partners in the activity have been European Schoolnet, which is pursuing large-scale exchange of objects between repositories through the ASPECT project (see more details), and TÉLUQ, the distance education arm of the Université de Québec à Montréal.

The issues IMS LODE is seeking to address involve both search queries and search results.
Read the rest of this entry »

We have already mentioned that the recent quarterly IMS meeting concentrated on developments in Common Cartridge, and how Common Cartridge is being aligned with other initiatives underway in IMS. One of those initiatives is Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), and was the subject of a developer workshop there.

The other major initiative involving Common Cartridge are Curriculum Standards, which are being added to Common Cartridge as metadata. We have also discussed here the importance of machine-readable curricula, and how they can be exploited as metadata for learning objects—to enable more focused discovery of learning objects, and better alignment of resources to a school’s curriculum. Including Curriculum Standards in Common Cartridge addresses these concerns expressly.
Read the rest of this entry »

The IMS Global quarterly meeting for mid-2009 was held at TELUQ, the distance education arm of the Université du Québec à Montréal, and a leader in e-learning research. This meeting incorporated workshops on Common Cartridge; Learning Tools Interoperability; and Curriculum Standards. (See the programme for the meeting.)

Many of the areas being addressed by the Digital Education Revolution were key concerns of the meeting:

• Lesson Plans (as they are being integrated into Common Cartridge)
• The interaction of web 2.0 technologies, and widgets in particular, with learning design tools
• Curriculum Description (as it is being integrated into Common Cartridge)
• Learning Content Discovery and Exchange (the IMS LODE project)
• Trials of Learning Tools Interoperability
• Future directions of IMS Learning Design.

One of the key focuses of the workshop was Common Cartridge as a way of packaging and distributing learning content. Common Cartridge is now up to version 1.1, and it has become important for IMS as an anchor for other activities enabling more effective learning. The meeting dedicated a day each to workshops exploring how Common Cartridge will interact with two major new initiatives, Curriculum Description and Learning Tools Interoperability.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sharing learning content between schools, jurisdictions, sectors—even countries—is an efficiency that makes sense, and is coming to make more and more sense, as there is more content to share, and more people needing content, with less time to write it. Content can be discovered on the open web, through Google, but that kind of discovery is not particularly targeted, quality-controlled, or inclusive. Learning content is normally discovered through repositories, with well-ordered, authoritative, and searchable metadata, rankings and ratings; with established authentication, authorisation and licensing; and all the value adding a controlled environment allows.

That’s all very well if you’re happy to stick to what’s locally available. If you’re not, you need to find out what relevant content there might be in other repositories, which you don’t yet have access to. In fact, even before that, you need to find out which other repositories there is any point in looking for at all. Repository federation, as seen in LORN in the vocational sector, deals with the problem by bringing the other repositories to you (and vice versa).

But there is no one federation of learning content repositories spanning the globe, and there is always something out there that could end up useful; so the problem of finding content elsewhere gets pushed up a level. Even within a federation, the repositories are still autonomously updating and enhancing content, and still need infrastructure to synchronise with each other, and exchange content. And by the time the federations turn into multinational federations of federations, as with the Learning Resource Exchange from European Schoolnet, or the GLOBE alliance, making content exchange scale over large distances and numbers becomes a pressing priority.

Τhe IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange (LODE) project group has been set up to help deal with this kind of issue. It intends to create consistent descriptions of registries of learning content, and services to discover and access such content. Crucially, it concentrates not only on ways of better discovering content through registries, but also on ways of discovering those registries themselves. This depends critically on metadata describing content registries—what kind of content they have, what fields they cover, how frequently they are updated, how their content is licensed. The metadata required to drive that kind of discovery is not a million miles away from how libraries and registries are described in general, and elsewhere we describe how we profiled the ISO 2146 standard for registry services to describe learning content registries under LODE.

• Note: There is an extensive post elsewhere on how European Schoolnet is harnessing the ASPECT project and IMS LODE to meet its goals of making learning content discoverable across the European Union. Link Affiliates are co-chairs of the LODE activity, and have spent a lot of time on repository federation infrastructure as something indispensable to improving education outcomes. (Hence for example the Federated Repositories in Education (FRED), project undertaken in 2007.) An Novermber 2008 summary of LODE work and Link Affiliates’ involvement is also available.

As part of our engagement with LODE, we are testing the CQL Context Set for SRU-based resource search, developed by LODE. We are also doing proof of concept development on using the FRBR model to cluster together search results for different versions, formats and copies of the same learning content. The development work is continuing apace at the USQ Advanced Digital Futures Institute, and the development wiki is publicly accessible.

The ISO 2146 standard defines a conceptual framework for registry services. It lays out a model of parties, collections, services, and activities, and how they all relate to each other, to capture the process of a library or repository going about its business of collecting content, and making content available. The standard originated in the library sphere, but is being written in a generic enough fashion to apply across a broad range of registries, both physical and digital, and across a range of disciplines. At the same time, it is intelligently specific in the attributes and relations it defines, so it allows reasonably detailed descriptions of what is going on in a registry. These descriptions can be the basis for cogent and useable metadata on collections in general, and on how they are presented to the world.

The new draft of ISO 2146 is still in progress (with the core participation of Link Affiliate Judith Pearce). But because of its advantages, it has already seen use in several domains. The Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA), under the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Reposiories (APSR), has used ISO 2146 as the basis for its descriptions of research collections in Australia, to be used for better discovery of both collections and services. ORCA, in turn, will form a major part of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS)’ Data Commons, a space where researchers nationally can share, discover, and build on the available collections of each others’ work.

In the e-learning space, the IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange project group has been set up to create consistent descriptions of registries of learning content, and services to discover and access such content. The collection descriptions that will be accessed through LODE all involve learning objects, but these can be of very different sorts, and with very heterogeneous content; IMS LODE is looking to be applied in contexts like the ASPECT project, or the Globe alliance, coordinating registries of learning content at various levels of schooling, from many countries.

Link Affiliates participates in IMS LODE. As the conceptual model for LODE description of registries was being drawn up, we believed that a profile of ISO 2146, customised to the particular requirements of e-learning registries, would be a suitable basis for it. Customising the ISO 2146 is consistent with how the scheme is meant to be used: it is a framework for making sense of the registry world, rather than a uniform schema—which is why it does not define an XML serialisation. That said, IMS LODE ISO 2146 is a rather elaborate model: it defines well over forty entities to describe the many ways in which registry entities can relate to each other, with complex relations between them. Cutting them down to a profile applicable to our context needed us to get a quick overview of what the model was expressing, and what the consequences were of eliminating or adding entities.

Read the rest of this entry »