e-Learning Technology Review

Emerging Learning Standards

"Solutions based on the specifications save customers money and reduce technical risks as the e-learning market continues to evolve." (http://www.imsproject.org). A current movement in the e-learning industry involves the development and adoption of learning standards. Vendors, academics, government agencies, and industry consortia are all collaborating to define ways that will enable learning technology products to inter-operate. Closed, proprietary solutions may have worked in the past for CD-ROM, but they are unacceptable for interoperability on the Web. The goal of the learning standards initiative is to develop open specifications. More developers are eschewing proprietary hardware and software designs that put systems at greater risk of obsolescence. (Barron, 1999) In the ideal, the result of standardization would be the ability to access all courses from any vendor directly from your intranet and administer these courses from any one training management system also from your intranet. Also, there would be compatibility across product lines. For example, you would be able to buy your management system from one vender, authoring from another, content from a third, and expect it to all work together.

The standards began to be developed in their raw form a decade ago by the Aviation Industry CBT Committee (AICC), an open forum of training professionals that develops guidelines for interoperable learning technology. The AICC has developed a Computer-Managed Instruction (CMI) specification that defines the tracking data exchanged between management systems and interactive lessons. It also defines an interchange format for course structure so that entire courses can be exchanged between management systems made by different vendors (Conner, 2000).

The EDUCOM Instructional Management Systems Project (IMS) is a coalition of over 225 educational institutions, training organizations, government agencies, and vendors defining a comprehensive architecture for online learning. The architecture encompasses platform independent interfaces for metadata, aggregated content, management services, user profiles and external services such as databases. The IMS architecture anticipates the widespread availability of emerging technologies such as XML and provides an excellent vision for the future of online learning. IMS recently submitted a metadata specification to the IEEE LTSC for standardization. Notable is the IMS metadata specification that was unanimously accepted by IMS on June 15. Metadata associates descriptive information, such as author, title or subject, with content so that it can be easily located and appropriately used. The IMS Metadata specification benefits the learner looking for specific information with a meta-data aware search tool both when the search is of web-based resources and CD-ROM or DVD-ROM encyclopedias. (http://www.imsproject.org/background.html)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) charts the future course of general purpose Web technologies such as HTML and XML. While the W3C does not focus on learning, it does define basic technologies that are assumed by many learning technology specifications.

The Computer Education Management Association (CedMA) is a forum whose members are education managers from companies manufacturing hardware or software products. CEdMA provides a forum to discuss training and business issues of common interest to technology vendors. It is well positioned to accelerate vendor awareness and adoption of learning technology standards.

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative fosters collaborations between government, academia and industry to accelerate the advent of effective online learning. The initiative began in November 1997 under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Defense and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Last June, the ADL conducted a successful test of its Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM), a reference model that defines a Web-based learning "content model." SCORM incorporates IMS metadata standards, and, for the first time, allows for content from different vendors' learning management systems to be passed to other vendors' systems without any problems. At the ADL-sponsored Plugfest in June, the ADL, AICC, IMS, and IEEE groups were able to meet together and discuss a unified e-learning specification that incorporates the four groups' work. (Bethoney, 2000) Also at the event, over 90 organizations pledged support for SCORM specification.

The IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (IEEE LTSC) is an open, accredited standards body tasked to develop "real", de jure learning technology standards. Consortia such as IMS, ADL, and the AICC increasingly acknowledge the IEEE LTSC as the single forum for turning specifications into standards. Both the AICC and IMS initiatives are furthering their goals in the IEEE LTSC. The AICC has submitted its CMI specification and IMS has jointly submitted a metadata specification with the European ARIADNE Project.

The Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks for Europe (ARIADNE) is a research and technology development (RTD) project pertaining to the "Telematics for Education and Training" sector of the 4th Framework Program for R&D of the European Union. The project focused on the development of tools and methodologies for producing, managing and reusing computer-based pedagogical elements and telematics supported training curricula. Validation of the project's concepts is currently taking place in various academic and corporate sites across Europe.

Since December 1997, ARIADNE has been involved in standardization activities performed under the auspices of the IEEE LTSC Committee. In this context, ARIADNE has agreed to collaborate with the US funded Educause IMS Project, in view of reaching as quickly as possible an Educational Metadata set that would be widely acceptable. ARIADNE is also active in the standardization activities initiated by the European Commission, scheduled to take place under the auspices of the CEN/ISSS (European Committee for Standardization / Information Society Standardization System). Work in this forum will initially concentrate on the "localization" of the mainly English language results obtained so far at the IEEE (Richards, 1998).