Introduction

The move to e-learning has been a major development in the recent history of education, involving changes in pedagogy and in the way in which technology is used to support learning. New approaches to education are emerging which promise improvements in provision and learning. Open source and free software and resources are also increasingly important in e-learning and e-teaching, in contrast to the 90´s, when proprietary code and software were dominant. This development is in part driven by economic and policy issues, but also by a desire to make knowledge more accessible.

Our intention in this article is to draw attention to two specific aspects which can make a key contribution to making these wider developments in e-learning successful. Firstly, in parallel with the changes we have mentioned, a number of institutions have collaborated to provide specifications and standards that address several widely recognised problems in e-learning. One key focus for this effort has been on interoperability and re-use, making it possible to use the same information package or learning scenario in several different tools, and to create new units of learning re-using some existing content. This is seen by many as being a key requirement for making e-learning an effective solution, and the main body of this article is taken up by a an introduction to some of the specifications which have been developed to address this need. Particular attention is given to IMS Learning Design, as its pedagogic expressiveness, and its function as a co-ordinating specification, give it a particularly important role.

Secondly, any successful e-learning effort (platform, specification, repository, editor…) needs to be supported by an active community, which is often partly or wholly virtual. The community requests information and raises problems, and provides answers and solutions. In the most cases, the community is open and free and the drive to participate is pure altruism and/or a need of information interchange (Hummel et al, 2005). At the end of the article we briefly describe how the UNFOLD project has contributed to supporting the communities which are working with e-learning specifications.

Standards and specifications

A standard is an international or national method, technology or format, documented in detail, commonly accepted, and backed-up by ISO (International Standards Organisation), CEN (European Centre of Normalization), IEEE or some other recognised standards setting institution. The establishment of a specification is a prior step, and is often carried out by a company or organization, and not yet certified by any standards setting institution. It may, however, be widely or universally adopted, and be accepted as a de facto standard (i.e. a specification which is so widely adopted that in practice it is recognised as an essential standard, even though it has not been given any special formal status).

We now provide an introduction to Learning Design, followed by a survey of the some of the other most well established and relevant e-learning specifications.

IMS LD: Learning Design (IMS, 2003)

IMS Learning Design, or simply IMS LD, (IMS, 2003) is a specification focused on modelling lesson plans and courses, and making them available online as Units of Learning (UoL). It is one of the more recent IMS specifications, and also one of the most ambitious in scope. A wide variety of pedagogical models can be represented by IMS LD, enabling teacher to adapt their resources and learning scenarios to virtual lessons in a flexible way. Far from only sequencing activities or using repositories of learning objects, IMS LD provides several features to create adaptive, dynamic and personalized learning (Burgos et al, 2005; Koper and Burgos, 2005). Through this description of different roles, activities, environments, methods, properties, conditions and notifications, IMS LD can be used to transform lesson plans into formally specified Units of Learning (UoL).

Thus the specification is a flexible way of representing and encoding learning scenarios for multiple or individual learners. It may help to think of it as a way of creating interoperable lesson plans which can be read by an application called a player. The player can take on responsibility for coordinating the learners, teachers, learning resources and activities as the learning process goes forward (Burgos et al, 2005a).

Learning Design does not offer a particular pedagogic model or models, but can rather be used to define a practically unlimited range of scenarios and pedagogic models. Because of this it is often referred to as a pedagogic meta-model. Some previous e-learning initiatives have claimed to be pedagogically neutral. Learning Design does not aim for pedagogic neutrality, but seeks to enable pedagogically aware e-learning.

We now go on to consider a number of other key e-learning specifications.

CP: Content Packaging (IMS, 2001)

Educational content often needs to be packaged in some electronic form, so as to support efficient aggregation, distribution, management and deployment of the content. Authors of educational materials need tools and technologies to assist them in creating content; learning management system vendors, computing platform vendors and learning services providers want efficient distribution and management of the educational materials created by authors; and students need good deployment and delivery of tools.

Thus Content Packaging provides a structure that integrates a number of elements. A Content Package can group, for example, LD (Learning Design), SS (Simple Sequencing), Meta-data and QTI (Question and Test Interoperability).

Final Version 1.1.2 of the IMS Content Packaging Specification was released to the public in August 2001. A revised version 1.2 will be published in mid 2006

LIP: Learner Information Package (IMS, 2001a)

The Learning Information Package is a specification for the records of information held about learners.
It was designed in order to allow records relating to learners and their progresses to be transferred between different software applications and institutions. Version 1.0 of the IMS Learner Information Package Specification was published in March, 2001.

Using LIP a record of all the learner’s achievements can be obtained, so LIP information on students’ progress could even substitute for paper certificates. Information can also be stored about the learner’s preferences, which can help, for example, to support the needs of learners with disabilities. All the information related to learners is stored in an XML file, which uses tags to specify what each piece of information in the record means.

SS: Simple Sequencing (IMS, 2003a)

This specification is used to define rules that determine the learner’s path through learning content. Alternative navigation paths through a learning material collection can be defined, which are followed in response to users actions. It defines a method to represent the intended behaviour of a learning object so that any compliant learning technology will be able to sequence learning activities in a consistent manner.

The Simple Sequencing binding provides a unique namespace which is embedded in the organization element of an Content Packaging manifest. Because Simple Sequencing uses the Content Package structure, it is possible to integrate a sequence into a Learning Design.

The Simple Sequencing Specification was published in March, 2003.

QTI: Question and Test Interoperability (IMS, 2003b)

The IMS Question and Test Interoperability specification makes it easier to share assessment information such as questions, tests and results. It provides a standard way to share data defined in XML, so that users can import and export questions, tests and results. The specification supports both simple and complex questions and tests, which are defined clearly and concisely so as to avoid ambiguity. In this way information about questions and about the learner and his or her results can be shared through different learning management systems and different software packages. Authors of assessments can create their own questions, or include questions designed for other IMS QTI users, making it easier to create question banks for reuse on different systems.

SCORM (ADL, 2000)

The SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) is a part of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative strategy. The primary sponsors of this initiative are the United States Department of Labour, Department of Defence and the National Guard Bureau.

SCORM was originally designed to support personnel instruction at the Department of Defence of the USA, and as a result the pedagogical assumptions which underlie SCORM reflect educational practice in these institutions. Previously the United States Department of Defence had experienced problems when trying to share courses among the different management systems used in the Department: truck drivers, fire-fighters and military and environmental personnel all had their own training materials and delivery systems, with slight differences between all of them. Moreover, the format for delivering training content, depended on the learning management systems, operating systems and authoring systems used by each organisation. If the organization needed to change one of these technologies, the training material might not work with the new system.

The UNFOLD Project, and support for the communities which work with e-learning specifications

UNFOLD project was conceived of as a measure to promote and coordinate the adoption, implementation and use of IMS Learning Design and related specifications, as this appeared to be the best candidate for resolving the need for more sophisticated interoperability. This judgement has been confirmed by developments during the life of the project. UNFOLD was funded by European Commission as a Framework 6 IST Coordination Action, and project partners were Pompeu Fabra University [www.upf.edu], The Open University of the Netherlands [ www.ou.nl], The University of Bolton [www.bolton.ac.uk] and EUCEN [www.eucen.org]. Extensive details about UNFOLD and its activities are available on the project website at [www.unfold-project.net], and so here we restrict ourselves to a brief outline of the project and its achievements.