John, you make a great point. The needs for higher ed and
corporate are somewhat different. That having been said, as
somebody who has done work in both worlds, I can tell you that
they are converging. The corporate world, which has largely been
focused on self-paced, is slowly coming to see the value of a
blended approach. Likewise, universities are coming to
understand that they need to create content assets (the online
equivalent of textbooks and workbooks) to use with their
instructor-facilitated courses.
To me, the best thing to do would be to put in the plumbing for
the standards now and let people hook into that plumbing on an
as-needed basis. I'm not technical enough to know whether
SCORM and IMS could usefully be implemented as service
contracts, but it may be worth thinking about it.
Off the top of my head, the IMS Enterprise specification (for
exchange of student ID info and similar stuff) is probably the
most immediately applicable across the various markets.
SCORM (which includes the IMS packaging and metadata
specificaitons), the IMS question & test spec (which may be
included in SCORM 1.3, though I'm not sure) and the simple
sequencing spec (which I'm pretty sure will be in SCORM 1.3)
are also important (though it's worth noting that the sequencing
spec is not yet final).
