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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Last month, ISO released the long-awaited third edition of the ISO 2146 standard for Registry services for libraries and related organisations. ISO 2146 is a standard of great interest to repository communities, and we have already posted on it at some length, including its use as a basis for the Australian National Data Service’s RIF-CS schema, and the IMS LODE registry model. (The latter post includes a UML diagram of the ISO 2146 classes as of its 2008 draft.) Because of this interest, it is worth describing the standard further.
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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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In a previous blog post we discussed a demonstration of the emerging IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification. The demonstration used IMS LIS to share learner and course information between a student information system (Campus Solutions) and learning environments (SAKAI, facebook, beehive):

LIS demonstration

In this post, we’ll reflect on the architecture Oracle used to implement the demonstration, and compare it with how the Schools Interoperability Framework might solve the same problem.

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We have discussed in the previous post SRU as a remote search protocol, and how it seeks to be broadly applicable by abstracting search indexes away from their native metadata formats. The new OASIS SWS (Search Web Services) standard, which is intended as the successor to SRU, goes further: it also abstracts search parameters away from the search protocol. SWS pursues interoperability between different search protocols, by abstracting to a common protocol model, of which actual search protocols are treated as bindings.
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The IMS Global quarterly meeting for late 2009 was hosted by Oracle at their Redwood City campus in California. During the meeting, Oracle and their partners gave a nice demonstration of systems integration using the emerging Learning Information Services specification.

About the LIS specification

The IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification supports

sharing of learner and course information between Student Information Systems and Learning Environments

It supersedes the previous IMS specification in this space (IMS Enterprise) that specified data formats for exchanging learning information between systems. LIS takes things a step further: as well as specifying data formats, it defines services for exchanging and synchronising student and course information between systems. This represents a new direction for IMS specifications: a shift toward a service oriented approach (soa) rather than a data oriented approach to system integration.

The LIS specification is large. It defines hundreds of operations in six services for managing updates to data about people, groups, memberships, courses, outcomes. It also has a bulk data exchange service that supports bulk provisioning of information between systems. Most of the services are defined using an IMS profile of the WS-I suite of specifications (WSDL, SOAP). There are also an LDAP binding for some of the services, and talk of REST-ful bindings in future versions.

An implementation of the specification is not required to support each and every service. Neither is an implementation required to support each and every operation. Rather, it is expected that communities will define profiles of the specification and implement those.

The demonstration

The demonstration itself involved an implementation of a higher education profile of the LIS specification. In the demonstration, Oracle used its Campus Solutions to manage information about students, course offerings, classes, grades etc in a mythical college. The product was essentially used as “single source of truth” for student and course information. Read the rest of this entry »

Reflections on e-Humanities workshop, Melbourne e-Research Scholarship Centre, 2009-08-12

Building generic ICT infrastructure to support humanities research seems to be a difficult task. The standard approach is to

1. collect a bunch of usage stories from different communities
2. infer common business processes based on those stories
3. build infrastructure that supports those business processes

The theory is that a community would then take the generic infrastructure and customise it to meet their particular needs. The problem is that there is something about the humanities that makes generic business processes hard to find.

We’ve blogged previously about the Project Bamboo approach to finding generic e-Humanities business processes. Project Bamboo certainly had difficulty converting its scholarly narratives into common recipes. Maybe there aren’t any processes common to the different strands of humanities research? Unlikely. Rather, the fierce independence of humanities researchers makes it difficult to infer commonalities. Suggesting to a humanities researcher that she might have a research process in common with her peers carries with it an inference that her research is not unique. Even uttering the phrase “business process”  can put humanities researchers offside (some of them conflate business and commerce).

In this context, there was a little nervousness leading up to the Interconnections and Services in the eHumanities: Reflecting on Current Initiatives workshop hosted by the University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre on 12 August.
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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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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.