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 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 »

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.