Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Background

There are a number of pesky things that can thwart improved educational outcomes. Some of them can seem a bit arcane. Not getting on top of stuff like copyright and intellectual property (IP) and standards and interoperability can not only blow the budget, they can also just stop good things happening. This reflection is just about the interoperability and standards angles, and is written by someone who has been involved in these things for a few years, but who is not down at the technical detail level of standards work.

 Australia has been at the forefront of global standards specifications for a number of years, actively participating in or leading various working groups in IMS, OASIS, IEEE,  NISO,  and the international e-framework. However the work has not been well understood or connected across the education technical community. This has led to a fracture in communications and endorsement. So why is this so?
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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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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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As a member of the program committee and one of the organisers I am probably not the most unbiased person to reflect on the recent IDEA event. However I will just the same. IDEA has been running for about six years and although each event has seemed to be worthwhile, the general buzz about this one was it was the best ever.

As usual IDEA brought together practitioners from all sectors of education: schools, vocational education and higher education both in the presenters and in the participants. This creates the first good thing to note. There are not many venues where practitioners from across education can get together and interact. So IDEA is a great opportunity to facilitate cross sectoral conversations and to allow practitioners to gain knowledge and expertise from other sectors. This type of knowledge sharing across the educational sectors is vital for the well being of education as a whole.

While IDEA always tries to attract technology/IT people, policy makers and leading edge teaching practitioners, this time we created a program where a conversation was developed between the teaching and the technology practitioners. And it seemed to work. Another thing to note about the event structure was short sharp panel presentations with plenty of time for audience participation. There were a lot of very good panels, one of the most engaging was ” What Technology Do Teachers Want”  which featured presenters from Schools, Universities and Vocational Education. There were three great presentations , one can be found at http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/files/IDEA10_20100311_AndrewDouch.pdf

As has been the case over the last three occasions the IDEA event incorporated the Learning Impact Awards (LIAs). This offers the opportunity for implementations of technology to compete to be judged as to who has had the most learning impact. The top three Australian entires then get financial support to attend the world finals (organised by IMS Global), this year in Long Beach California . In previous years Australian entries have done very well at the world finals. As part of the judging event participants go on a “speed dating” session with each of the entries as do the judges. This year the top three in the people’s choice was the same as the top three from the judges, just the order was different.

2010 was the first time IDEA has had a formal Program Committee and worked with a professional conference organiser. Both added greatly to the value of the event.

Another innovation this year was to stream the event live and then have a video archive available for later viewing by event participants as well as those unable to attend the event itself. In truth we did not promote the live streaming enough (maybe we were nervous as it was our first foray into this), but at least we have captured the event for posterity.

Also in 2010 we managed to attract some more sponsors which allowed for a bit more sophistication with food and technology at the event.  At the same time the sponsors were able to engage with key practitioners across education in one  small venue. Presentations by Motorola  http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/files/IDEA10_20100312_RobArmstrong.pdf  and Lappset  http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/events/speakers.html#makela further enhanced this engagement.

You might wonder what could be improved. Well there are possibly a few things, although the program committee thought this was being obsessively self critical, including:

• We probably packed in too many speakers not leaving enough time for audience interactions
• We made the first day of the Open Form a bit too long so some people were too tired to fully participate in the speed dating (which for many was a highlight)
• There was probably too many presentations not enough action on the IDEALab day

But overall everyone seemed to get a heap out of the three days and there was a real buzz. The senior policy people present also remarked on how valuable the event was.

In terms of  the future there does seem a place for a cross sectoral event in this space and the Australian regional finals for the LIAs are a must for continuing to foster innovation and good practice for using technology for learning. Hopefully there will be a funding mechanism to allow investment for future IDEA events. March is not necessarily the best time for the event, in previous years it has run in October/November but it needs to be timed so that LIA winners can get organised to go to the world finals which are usually in May.

To see all the presentations, view the video clips and get a sense of the atmosphere of IDEA go to http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/idea10/ and watch that space for the next event!

This is my first ever attempt at writing a blog so please forgive me for going in all directions while expressing myself. This is quite daunting to think that I have something to say that this mesmerizing virtual world would be interested in reading.  However, I have no choice but to write this. There is no way I can say “NO” to my dear colleague Nick Nicholas who has so kindly asked me share my IMS-LIA Award experience with those who wish to participate in this year.  So I will attempt to write a few things about this experience in my own way. So here it goes….

IMS packaging and metadata standards have been part of  The Le@rning Federation (TLF) since the inception of this initiative in 2001. I have been involved with IMS work in some form or the other since I joined TLF in 2006.  One of the biggest challenges TLF faced at that time was how the wonderful digital materials it produced can be accessed by preschool teachers who had no access to a state-wide system.  My manager Nick Weideman and other managers at TLF had conceptualized a portal to resolve this delivery challenge when I was brought in to manage the development of this portal. This is where this journey began……
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In 2008, the Link Affiliates team carried out a project for DEEWR, the Department of Education Employment and Work Place Relations, to investigate the use of learner identities especially in the school sector. All states and territories, were consulted at the school level including government and non government school jurisdictions, as well as vocational education and higher education representatives.
The report from this work can be found at the Australian Information and Communications Technology in Education Committee, AICTEC website at http://www.aictec.edu.au/aictec/go/home/about/pid/289     It is a hefty report and not one for the faint hearted. It uses an e- framework http://www.e-framework.org/ approach to analyse the possibilities for using a learner identity management framework, LIMF for assisting in the smooth transition of students between jurisdictions and systems. More than 180,000 students transfer between systems/jurisdictions each year and the current manual system of transferring information to assist in a smooth learning transition is not well utlised. 

The report made a number of recommendations on how to progress the use of learner identities in Australia especialy with regard to student transfer. These recommendations are now under consideration by a sub committee of AICTEC.
At the same time the vocational education sector is revisting the report to assist in the establishment of e-portfolio approaches.

This was a tight contained project carried out within a short time frame. While it was concerned to report on the specific issue of school student transfer, it is suggested that it is a useful document for consideration of learner identity issues in general. Other perspectives would be most welcome.