Rory McGreal and Norm Friesen offered their views, for the most part, seamlessly complementing each other’s information into a consolidated answer, while sifting through the many official and non-official standards in use today, identifying CanCore´s role in projects and implementations. CanCore has been heading up an ongoing international effort to survey the use of LOM elements for the ISO/IEC subcommittee on "Information Technology for Learning, Education and Training." (See ELR News, December)

McGreal and Friesen discuss the obstacles faced by, questions to be addressed on, preparation for, interoperability of, compliance to, and pitfalls in effecting a concensus on standards.

ELR What’s the current state of standards in terms of their adoption by corporations and educational institutions?

NF & RM We´re currently passing one of the early milestones in terms of adoption and use of e-learning standards. There are now a small number of "official" international standards in e-learning such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard, which is the most prominent. This is one of the standards on which the well known SCORM implementation profile is based.

Together with a slightly larger number of "unofficial" standards (specifications) such as IMS Content Packaging these have been implemented in projects by corporations around the world.  Because the LOM is both widely implemented and complex, a number of application profiles have been developed around the world to adapt and simplify it.  CanCore represents a special, generic instance of these profiles, in that it provides recommendations for the implementation of all of the fields of the LOM, and can itself be adapted for use in a wide variety of projects and implementations. 

ELR What are the main shortcomings of implementing standards?

NF One of the biggest challenges is educating people about what standards can and can´t do, and how they should be used.  Often, standards-based solutions like SCORM or CanCore are seen by vendors, developers and customers as being a simple matter of "yes" or "no" --of "compliance" or  "non-compliance." It is good that the underlying value of these standards is recognized, but there´s more to it than this.  Especially at this early stage, other questions need to be asked, such as "how are the standards interpreted, understood and put to use?" and "What other kinds of systems can a standards-based product actually interoperate with?" 

To paraphrase Dan Rehak of SCORM, it isn´t good enough to say "my product is SCORM compliant."  Instead, we need to understand:  "How does the product implement SCORM, what parts of SCORM does it utilize, and how does it make use of these parts?"

RM Another challenge is how to interpret the details and ambiguities in standards and specifications when implementing them.  This can have a significant impact on interoperability.  One example is how many fields to use when creating a collection of learning objects based on the LOM. CanCore recommends the elimination of at least 14 of these, and provides guidance for eliminating still more. Projects that wish to utilize still fewer of these fields can certainly do so.  However, this reduction in the number of fields applies only to data entry or record creation.  It does not hold for the creation of a LOM-based infrastructure, where all of the LOM elements should be supported in order to allow for effective record sharing.

ELR Most commercial providers have focused on applying standards such as SCORM to solve the interoperability challenge. What do you think that reusability and shareability have not been addressed with the same attention? Why?

NF & RM Actually, all three of these issues --interoperability, reusability and shareability-- are inextricably intermixed.  Interoperability generally refers to the ability of systems to share data. This means that the data can be shared and reused across systems, institutions, projects and jurisdictions.  If anything has obviously been missed in addressing these combined challenges, it is the heterogeneous requirements and practices among those who are to be the users and beneficiaries of these standards. 

E-Learning is a deceptively short and simple term that covers an incredibly wide variety of communities and subgroups.  As a result, we need to ask more questions like: Does this loose collection of communities and practices actually give rise to e-learning content that shared, adapted and reused among these groups? If there are sub-sections of this group that can share in this way (and clearly there are), then what are the costs, benefits and rewards for those who could be doing this? What are the legal implications of doing this?

ELR Do you think that content developers have understood the pedagogical impact of complying with standards?

NF & RM It seems to me that there are some misunderstandings about this --among content developers but also among others.  The pedagogical ramifications of e-learning standards implementation have most frequently been dealt with by designating these standards as *"pedagogically neutral" --by asserting that pedagogy is something separate from the implementation and operation of these standards.  But given almost any understanding of the term "pedagogy," this notion of neutrality is difficult to maintain.  There are very few, if any, e-learning standards that will be "neutral" when viewed across various pedagogical contexts and approaches.

Instead, any standard, specification, or collection of standards will generally serve some educational approaches quite well, and will be much less useful in other contexts.  Debates about the general utility of SCORM in training versus other educational contexts illustrate this. SCORM was developed in the technical training community and so, as a framework, is not readily adaptable to other educational contexts such as schools or universities. 

It would probably be better for the supporters of SCORM and of standards and profiles to be up-front about their pedagogical commitment to particular approaches, instead of claiming pedagogical neutrality.

ELR SCORM seems to be the standard that will prevail among those currently in use. What is your view?

NF & RM SCORM is actually an integrated collection of standards and specifications, and yes, I agree that it is likely to remain dominant in particular sectors, notably with private multimedia courseware companies that wish to sell their products to the US government and to other major organizations in the US.  However, it is not in competition with other standards solutions.  Rather, it often serves to complement them, and is likely to have the effect of encouraging the development and adaptation of other standards and specifications. 

For example, many involved in the SCORM development community are now active in developing a common set of tools and APIs for learning management systems widely used in public education.  The standards-based SCORM approach, in other words, is providing the foundation and motivation for further, and very targeted standardization work. 

ELR What is the aim of CanCore, and how widespread is its use?

NF & RM The aim of CanCore is to enhance the ability of educators, researchers and students in Canada and around the world to search and locate material from online collections of educational resources. CanCore is accomplishing this by assisting project implementers and indexers in the development of high-quality systems and records for sharing these resources. 

One of the main types of assistance it provides comes in the form of its guidelines documentation, which provides indexing and technical advice for all 76 of the data elements in the IEEE LOM standard. 

CanCore has been working with an expanding community of implementers since November of 2000. During this time, the CanCore guidelines have been used in public and private-sector projects in many Canadian jurisdictions and provinces, in pan-Canadian initiatives, and in projects in the US, France, the UK and elsewhere. As a result of this and other work, CanCore and Canada generally have been widely recognized as providing valuable leadership in e-learning metadata implementation.

* For more information on this subject, read Norm Friesen´s paper on Learning Objects and Standards: Pedagogical Neutrality and Engagement

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Biography

Norm Friesen, PhD is director of CanCore, an initiative towards the collaborative development, interpretation and implementation of an international standard for "Learning Object Metadata."

Friesen has been working in the area of instructional Web development at the University of Alberta and Athabasca since 1997. He is the author of "The McGraw-Hill Guide to WebCT for Instructors: Design, Development and Delivery," and helps to coordinate faculty support for WebCT at the University of Alberta 

Rory McGreal, PhD is leader in the development of the CanCore metadata profile for implementing IMS/SCORM, and Associate Vice President of Research at Athabasca University. He is on the Education Steering Committee for CANARIE Inc., Canada´s broadband research network. McGreal has published numerous articles and book chapters on e-learning, conducted many workshops on learning objects and metadata and founded one of the first e-learning websites.