Carl, I'd welcome bringing the discussion into the OpenACS site at whatever point it seems appropriate. I gather you have edit permissions at openacs.org that allow you to accomplish this? I think it would be particularly helpful to pool our knowledge about existing standards, requirements, and competitive analyses.
Also, early on I think we should examine whether the various spaces we're discussing (educational, clinical research, generic data collection mechanisms for use elsewhere in the OpenACS toolkit, others?) actually do share enough commonality that it makes sense to try to create one general solution, or whether the appearance of commonality is superficial and crisper, separate solutions might be superior.
I've added some additional information and links here about CDISC, the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium, and several big vendors of Electronic Data Capture solutions. The field is occupied by big players but their big, big price tags creates the need for alternatives -- and opens the opportunity for them.
