Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Adaptive learning

Talli, while I greatly appreciate your rallying to my defense, I actually feel that Staffan is being quite civilized about the (legitimate) conerns that he's raising. Furthermore, the User Advisory Board is called an "advisory" board for a reason. We advise the community on certain issues. We don't direct.

I think I can offer some perspective here that will resolve the potential conflicts here. My concerns are regarding adaptive learning writ large. There is a large set of problems that falls under the heading of "adaptive learning" and I simply don't believe that that the IMS approach is well suited to ultimately solve some of the most difficult (and interesting, and valuable) problems within this problem set.

OTOH, the "Curriculum" module does not necessarily seek to solve the full problem set of adaptive learning. If current or potential dotLRN users see a need for the functionality that the Curriculum module will provide, and if Staffan's team believes that the Simple Sequencing spec is well suited as a means for providing that functionality, then I would say to any potential funders that there is no reason not to go ahead. On the contrary, it most certainly be helpful for us to be able to say that we have implemented Simple Sequencing which, whatever my opinion, is now a stardard that has been adopted by the two most widely respected e-learning standards bodies in the industry.

All that having been said, one of my roles *is* to educate the dotLRN/OpenACS development community on the broader and deeper issues in online learning. We have to be very careful about how we sling the lingo and what we claim dotLRN can (and cannot) do. However the IMS officially describes LMS's, for example, the most common (though not universal) understanding of what an "LMS" is is a system that is at least partly compliant with AICC, SCORM 1.x, or both. We can (and should) brag about what dotLRN can do; we can (and should) be agressive about going head-to-head Blackboard and  WebCT, too. However, we should not call dotLRN an LMS when we do so. Likewise, we should be agressive about building out a curriculum module if we think it offers functionality that is immediately useful. In the process, though, we should be careful and conservative about any claims we make regarding adaptive learning. And we should be looking *beyond* the standards as well as *to* them in order to see where we can provide leadership.

I am in no way, shape, or form discouraging the building of the curriculum module. I do not claim to speak for the needs of the community and would never discouraging people from building what they need. That would be antithetical to everything we are trying to do here. In fact, I'll go even further. Staffan, if you would find my input on the functional spec for Curriculum to be helpful, please email me. I would be delighted to help you move the project forward in any way that I can.

Without contracting any of that, though, let me renew my plea for the community to look very seriously at implementing SCORM 1.2 sooner rather than later and let me also strongly caution the community to be very careful about using e-learning industry terminology without making sure that we have shared understanding of what the industry means when it uses these terms. Staffan, true adaptive learning is hard. Really and truly. It's not hard because of the technology. It's hard because boiling down the principles of good, interactive teaching into a set of algorythms is really hard. I'm sure that Simple Sequencing is a fairly straightforward spec. I'm much less sure, though, that it solves the problems of true adaptive learning.