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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Late last year Link Affiliates carried out some research for the Australian Flexible Learning Framework’s E-Standards for Training business activity to

identify and document the potential applications of a trust federation approach in the Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector

We were asked to create use cases (scenarios) that clarify the benefits of a VET trust federation, and to identify appropriate technologies for each scenario (the research brief recognised that different technologies might be appropriate for different scenarios).

The resulting analysis identified a number of VET services that could benefit from a trust federation, but also uncovered a complex trust environment with overlapping identity and service providers, and found that no single technology was appropriate for all of the use cases. This post summarises of our findings. Check out the report on the E-standards for Training website for full details … Read the rest of this entry »

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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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 »

As in other sectors, schools have long been burdened with the incompatibility of the multiple IT systems used to run their business. The Learning Management Systems, the Student Enrolment Systems, the systems dealing with assessment, pastoral care, attendance, staffing, timetabling—all of these store data about the same students in different ways, and each exports data in its own way. To get the systems to share data between each other has often meant costly custom porting for each pair—where it has not involved printing the data out, and rekeying it from scratch. Waving printouts at a keyboard is not, of course, fulfilling the promise of the paperless office, and it hardly translates to data at one’s fingertips.

The school sector realised quite early (1998) that something could be done about this, and the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) was developed Stateside in response to it. SIF was developed several years before Service-Oriented Architecture started to address similar issues of data incompatibility in industry, but it takes an approach similar enough that it can be stated in SOA terms. Data is exchanged between systems across a common trust environment, using common data structures in XML—just like the Enterprise Service Bus and SOAP of SOA. Systems are able to exchange data because agents translate their native data to the common formats and back again. Data can be pulled in, in a request–response pattern, or pushed out, in a subscription pattern. Unlike SOA, the protocols and common data models are standardised and fixed ahead of time for the school domain, and do not require the systems to be reengineered to fit the system protocols better; so SIF can be layered over existing systems relatively straightforwardly.

The recent trend in the Australian government school sector, and to a growing extent in the Catholic sector, has been to host school systems centrally; this leads to greater efficiencies and security in how data is handled and exchanged, and relieves schools from the burden of having to run systems themselves. However, jurisdictions still have to deal with multiple systems internally, some more centralised than others. They also have occasion to exchange data with other jurisdictions and schools, especially when students move interstate, or in dealing with national testing and benchmarking. Dealing with these issues has made SIF an attractive proposition for the Australian school sector, whether to support the integration of all their internal systems, as is taking place in Victoria, or to provide a consistent outward interface to the data they are authorised to share. This has led to the SIF Association AU initiative, led by representatives from all Australian school systems.

As a relatively lightweight technical architecture, SIF does not particularly depend on where it is deployed, and there have already been several successful deployments of SIF in the UK, in addition to the pilots now underway in Australia. What does need to change from place to place is the model underlying the common data format that the system uses. The original SIF data model deals with the realities of the American school system, so it represents data that makes sense for that context. Because students are provided lunch at school, the logistics of school canteens are a major concern of SIF data modelling, and there are obvious dollar and cent efficiencies in getting the canteen system to talk to the student attendance system. When Australian school systems exchange information, canteen logistics are not a major concern; but getting timetabling right is.

Likewise, the data fields and values captured in SIF reflect American conventions and requirements: they deal in quarters and quinmesters, charter schools, and demographics driven by the American Census and the NCES. The data collected and exchanged in Australian schools needs to reflect Australian requirements, and to conform to Australian norms and conventions. So data is about ESL, not English Proficiency, and the codes for countries and languages are the Australian Bureau of Statistics’. Dealing with these codes in turn means addressing questions such as how many different shades of “Not Applicable” to allow for Yes/No fields, or whether to include both the nodes and the leaves in a hierarchical vocabulary (e.g. whether to allow Netherlandic as a language choice, or only its child nodes, Dutch and Frisian).

Link Affiliates and the ABS, along with members of the SIF-AU data working group, gave feedback on how best to specify the data objects and vocabularies to be used. The SIF-AU draft standard is now being vetted by SIF; meanwhile, pilot projects are underway in several jurisdictions, with an aim to finalise work by the end of the year.