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).
