Linking research & learning technologies through standards

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 IMS Global Learning Consortium recently released a white paper about Service Oriented Architecture, as announced on our news page and elsewhere. Service Oriented Architecture is an approach where IT solutions are delivered via small modules or “services”. Such IT services are designed for reuse across a wide range of different IT systems.  For example, many Education systems require information about students. This information can be shared across authorized systems by developing a dedicated service for providing student information. Through the use of services, SOA aims to better align systems with the organisation’s needs by offering more flexible, reusable and reconfigurable solutions or so the theory goes.

There has been a lot of interest in using SOA to manage and plan software systems for education organisations both here in Australia and internationally, which is why we were interested to be involved.

Much of the literature about SOA to date is aimed at the business world and doesn’t address the specific requirements or challenges of education organisations. This IMS SOA white paper is aimed at facilitating greater discussion and adoption of SOA in education by contextualising it to the needs of education organisations. It includes a number of authentic education-specific scenarios including:

• Integration of enterprise applications
• Virtual desktop shared service
• Financial aid
• Learner centred e-portfolios

IBM and Oracle have both had significant involvement in writing this paper. The Link Affiliates team was also involved in editing the document and we contributed the e-portfolio scenario chapter. Link Affiliates’ involvement aside, I would recommended it to anyone wanting to find out more about SOA or may be considering a SOA implementation.

IMS has set up a SOA community forum for people to post comments and feedback on the paper and on the use of SOA approaches in education in general. To date, there hasn’t been much discussion on the forum, but hopefully some interesting conversations can take place once people have had some time to reflect.   An updated version of the paper will be released by the IMS which will take into account comments received by the middle of July.