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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »