Forum .LRN Q&A: .LRN Standards (SCORM, IMS, OKI...) -- Looking for Volunteers

Count me in. I'm really only familiar with the IMS Simple Sequencing Specification, but I'd like to learn more about the other standards.

I should mention that from the MIT side Andrew Grumet and Tracy Adams will be involved. Also, I hope to involve Chris Wisdo, who is very knowledgeable about SCORM and IMS. Chris is working for MIT on a contract basis on a couple of educational technology projects.

We will do what we can. Steve Lay (who led was involved in developing the IMS QTI spec) is here, we have written a SCORM player and we have dabbled with the IMS digital repositories spec.

And I hope to track down Michael Feldstein, who is a great resource on these topics.

As I was reading up on and getting a feel for eLearning standards I came across a rather good introduction to the subject. If anyone out there wants to get a first grip on these matters, or if you veterans want to reframe the big picture, you could visit the CETIS homepage and check out the links in the "Welcome to CETIS" box and those under the "Background" headline in the left margin menu.

The main thing these brief texts want to teach us is the basic categorization of the organizations working in this the educational technology interoperability field into specification bodies (IMS), standards bodies (IEEE), and application profiling bodies (ADL-SCORM). You'll also find a presentation of what organizations are involved in what specific areas.

Hi

Besides Ernie's work on IMS Content packaging, Learning Repositories etc (that we hope to continue contributing to), we plan to work on two new projects: IMS Learner Information Profile and IMS Learning Design.

We are also looking at exporting web services from .LRN in a way that (hopefully) will relate to the OKI project

cheers

Rafael

Good to know that everything around .LRN is moving fordward.
Galileo has provided the IMS Enterprise v.1.1 specification that allows you integrate automatically your legacy systems (i.e. student - courses database) with .LRN.

FYI, Galileo has launched a pilot .LRN (2.1) instance a couple of weeks ago [ges2.galileo.edu]. Running like 12 courses with more than a 100 real users, so far has been a good experience with good feedback from the users. Our plan is to fully migrate our system to .LRN (2.1) in 2 weeks from now.

Michael, Great to hear from you..Look forward to your participation...

Sakai is an Open $ource project, that's for sure!

Making .LRN xxx compliant might be good for marketing, but unless we put real use cases to it, there is no good reason to travel down that path and I think we should give good and valid reasons why we support standard x or y beforehand.

Which brings me back to a discussion I had two days ago about interchangeability of OpenSource LMS systems. In Germany we have the situation where one university has (usually) more than 5 different LMS installed, sometimes even two in the same faculty. As authors want to use the LMS that suits best their needs, the desire to exchange learning content has crept up. This is necessary if you have cooperative courses with other universities (that might use different LMS systems) or if you want to exchange your LMS at your faculty. Not to forget that authoring software and the corresponding "player" have to be able to be integrated into the LMS as well.

Though the idea of IMS standards is to provide this, we should first create a use case (hopefully demand driven) and implement the specification of the standard based on this use case. Here is my current view on .LRN in that regard:

- The work done by Ernie (LORS/M) allows us to import courses from Blackboard. Which is a really valuable argument if you want to convince universities to switch from Blackboard.

- The IMS QTI effort driven by UC3M will allow tests to be generated by external systems and imported into .LRN. Which luckily includes WebCT.

- Maybe Rocael could explain what systems he knows could be integrated to .LRN and what the exact use case would be (I quickly read up on IMS at the JISC (http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/Resources/external-resources/enterprisebrief.pdf/view) but I assume there is more to it than exchanging registration information between the student enrollment office and .LRN).

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but .LRN currently is missing:

- At least one strong supporter that is internationally reknown (not institution, individual, who could go to these foundations in person)
- Good contacts into the foundation sector and experience in grant application.
- No clear focus on the US (I might be wrong, but most US foundations are focused on funding in the US).
- Clear goals on what to do with the money (no ideas what to apply the grant for).
- Coherent marketing. Public relations that have an impact.
- Speakers that attend conferences and brag about .LRN all the time.
- Recognition in public (e.g. Sakai = 650.000 googles, .lrn&openacs = 27.000).

I'm pretty sure you will find all this with Sakai, which explains the amount of funding. .LRN should therefore hope to be able to piggyback on other initiatives that will make use of the vast possibilities and easy of modification of .LRN as an enabler (see E-Lane project).

Malte,

I guess maybe we could just change the question to... do we really need SCORM RTE in .LRN?

In the past year or so I haven't really come across more than a handful university courses that make use of SCORM RTE. As a matter of fact -and again, this is based on my experience- very few academics have good things to say about SCORM.

I can see the benefit of having SCORM RTE content for self-paced courseware, but I'm not so sure if that's what lecturers feel it is the right way to delivery their course materials.

A few days back, talking with Rocael, he mentioned that to them (e-lane people) it is more important to have a user monitoring feature to track the students's time and number of views on the content.

However, Giancarlo has emailed me about adding SCORM RTE to LORS.

I was wondering then, if there are many people out there that do have a need for a proper SCORM RTE in .LRN?

Thanks,

Ernie

PS: This weekend I promise the announcement and release of LORS 0.4d on CVS and full documentation (thesis included 😉

In addition to marketing objectives (it would be interesting to see which open source projects have a SCORM RTE)... I think a SCORM RTE is important when you deal with copyrighted materials: i.e. the content provider lets you access a courseware only through a SCORM interface... This may not be a common case in a university, rather in an ASP environment.

Ernie, you are correct that there has been limited interest in SCORM in higher ed, partly because (as you point out) SCORM is really designed for a self-paced learning environment and has somewhat less value where you have an active, participating instructor and partly because of the way that SCORM was marketed. On the issue of copyright, while SCORM could help with compliance issues, there are simpler mechanisms to do this.

SCORM's biggest advantage to dotLRN would be as a cross-over into the world of non-profits and small to mid-sized companies. There really aren't many good choices for smaller organizations that want to do a mix of self-paced and instructor-facilitated learning, and dotLRN could potentially fill that niche rather nicely (although you start running into stiffer resistance to the technology platform than you probably get in higher ed).

But I'd have to agree that, at this point, dotLRN's core market of higher ed has made it fairly clear that SCORM isn't something that they care a whole lot about. It didn't have to go this way, but that's the way the cookie crumbled.

I have no experience with the back-end applications that Rocael is referring to; my experience to date has mainly been with standards that directly impact learning. So, regarding the integration stuff in general (including some of the OKI stuff), I think you have to take a look at who is currently using it for what.