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

There are three layers in Sakai:

  • JSR 168 (uPortal is one implementation of that spec)
  • The OKI APIs
  • The Sakai APIs

I'd say these are listed roughly in order of importance. JSR 168 is the most lightweight and the most ubiquitous. As a side point, I think it may be just as important for dotLRN to be able to take JSR 168-compliant inputs as it is to be able to output to it. Enabling dotLRN users to create portlets for externally developed JSR 168-compliant tools would be a win.

OKI would be next in line. OKI has gotten an enormous amount of hype but it remains to be seen whether the APIs are going to be too cumbersome for widespread adoption. I think it will be very important to have work done on OKI for marketing reasons but, realistically, I'm not that sure there will be a whole lot of practical applications for the next couple of years. You might want to pick a few OSIDs that look the most useful to implement first and then have a longer-term plan for full compliance.

The Sakai API's themselves are probably least important in the long-run, since they are specific to Sakai. Before you put too much energy into these (or cough up the $10K to read the forums), I'd have somebody play around with the public release first.

Are there reasonable use cases for making dotLRN interoperate with Sakai? None leap to mind for me, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any. I haven't spent too much time looking into Sakai yet, so I don't know for sure. Even if there isn't a good use case for Sakai in the real world, it could still be very useful as a testing tool for the dotLRN developer community, since it is both JSR 168- and OKI-compliant. Again, though, I don't think you'll need to get too highly involved with the Sakai community to do that.

In general, I've grown far more skeptical of online learning standards over the past few years. They're too heavy and programmer-oriented for educators to use directly, to rigid to handle a huge range of real-world uses, and too vague to have completely standardized implementations. Even SCORM, which is by far the most successful initiative from the IMS/IEEE/ADL groups, has some serious problems. I'm starting to think that this isn't the right way to g(r)o(w).

Actually, one of the most important standards for online learning (believe it or not) may turn out to be RSS. In addition to the blogging craze, learning object repositories like MERLOT and MLX are using RSS feeds to syndicate their content. You could do a lot to move dotLRN forward as a platform simply by making it dirt-simple for users to create RSS- and OPML-based portlets and by making RSS feeds out of modules ubiquitous.

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).

<blockquote>- 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).
</blockquote>

Well, in the case of what has already  been implemented (IMS Enterprise), it allow to integrate to any system that could create this XML document to create users, classes (or whatever  you want them to name) and the relations among them, with different types of users.
So the legacy system might the univerities administrative system or a HR system at a corporation or whatever. I think IMS has done a good job on doing standards for packaging and intercommunication, which most of the times has nothing to do with learning process ....