Flash For Learning

Several weeks ago, a call for white papers was announced to provide the broadest possible input into shaping SCORM 2.0.

We have this framework that most E-Learning content and Learning Management Systems use as a basis for their data tracking, communication and delivery — it’s called SCORM. You may not know how SCORM works, but if you’re involved in any way with E-Learning, you must know that its very existence affects you; specifically in how it sets the parameters for the learning experience you can provide in Learning Management Systems and Learning Environments (like Moodle or Blackboard) that support the framework.

10 years ago, it was a sketch on a chalkboard (literally). Today it permeates every way in which organizations of all kinds approach distributed learning and its technologies.

And we’re going to do it again with SCORM 2.0. We’re willing to start from scratch and solve future learning challenges. And we’re willing to fix what’s broken.

Much has been discussed (for a very long time) about what’s wrong with SCORM. It is a subset of the greater discussion about what people feel is wrong with E-Learning. What the community is missing are the solutions… how do we fix it? How do we transform the field into something better/appropriate/right/good?

This is the opportunity I present to you. SCORM affects you as a purveyor of E-Learning, whether you create it, manage it, believe in it or loathe it. There is a real honest-to-goodness effort to bring in voices from outside the mainstream of standards development and produce an open (read: source) model for how learning takes place.

I am chairing a Program Area for LETSI, which means I’ll be helping to field, promote and review ideas presented about Interaction, Collaboration and Community.

I ask you with the whole of my heart: if you have a gripe about E-Learning, write it down and send it on — that is the basis of a White Paper for our purposes. This is not the academic or government world “white paper” — you don’t even need to propose the solution — just help us define the particular problem you want solved.

If you have a solution (but can’t figure out the problem exactly) — at least capture your pondering about what scenarios your idea could address. Direct me to your blog post — that works, too.

Your voice NEEDS to be heard. I/we at LETSI need to hear it.

Please consider the following…

• State the business, learning, or technology problem you want to address.
• Identify an existing or new service, specification, model or standard that should be incorporated into SCORM 2.0 to solve your problem.
• Explain how the solution could be implemented and tested by early 2009.

There are no constraints on format. We’re calling this kind of briefing a “white paper” — but if you want to produce a video or audio podcast to get this information to us — hey, that’s awesome.

Please send your white paper to scorm2@letsi.org — and if you’d rather send it directly to me, I’ll be happy to handle it from there.

Technorati Tags: scorm 2.0, scorm, white paper, standards, letsi, interaction, collaboration, community

Yahoo has a fantastic Design Stencil Kit in several formats, including OmniGraffle and Visio. I’ve recently started jumping on the Information Architecture bandwagon and found that visually planning out a web-based design with wireframes was not only helpful but saved me a bunch of time from the “let’s see what kind of layout I can code today” method.

As I continue to work on my pet project of building good SCORM content for the iPhone (just for kicks), this kit from Yahoo will be a big help.

Summary: If you want the all open source (for reals) SCORM 2.0 to address something in particular, get it in a white paper to LETSI by August 15.

LETSI, Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability, the international, nonprofit federation dedicated to improving individual and organizational learning, has taken on the task of developing the next generation of SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model. As part of this initiative, LETSI is soliciting White Papers from all stakeholders interested in shaping the future direction of SCORM and the implementation of learning systems technology.

Stakeholders in all parts of the education and training world are invited to submit White Papers concerning the technical and pedagogical requirements for future learning systems interoperability. The deadline for submission is August 15, 2008. The open solicitation was announced May 28th, 2008 at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, hosted by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative in Alexandria, VA.

The development of the next SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model, has been tasked to LETSI, a new international federation for Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability. LETSI’s goal is to advance innovation and adoption of learning technology across all market sectors and to support the use of open software standards in learning technology.

Open standards reduce life cycle costs and risks, and promote innovation. SCORM allows content developed in one system to be shared and fully functional within any other SCORM-conformant system. SCORM has been successfully used to develop sharable content in self-paced military training; automobile sales force training; healthcare professional re-certification; K-12 after-school tutoring in South Korea; and many other types of e-learning applications. Over the last decade, SCORM has become the de facto international software standard for learning systems interoperability.

SCORM 2.0 will include specifications and standards created and managed using open, transparent processes that are not encumbered by patents, licenses or restrictions that would impinge on its availability to the global LET community. LETSI will create an open source software community to support SCORM adopters and product developers. LETSI itself does not develop the component standards that go into SCORM.

“Given the demands for harmonization across international technical learning standards, Core SCORM will be based on unencumbered open standards to maximize market growth and global adoption and implementation.” — Paul Jesukiewicz, Deputy Director, Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.

Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL), which has been the advocate and steward of the first ten years of SCORM’s development, will continue to support the SCORM community and will maintain the current version, SCORM 2004, 3rd Edition. LETSI was formed by the ADL and eleven other organizations to provide an international, balanced, open forum for SCORM development and to harmonize activity across the diverse communities that are investing in learning technology: public education, higher education, for-profit education, military training, professional development/certification, corporate training, and on-the-job performance support.

To accommodate these diverse market needs, SCORM 2.0 will have two components:

1. A general reference model, Core SCORM, based on widely adopted, accredited learning technology standards that support basic interoperability.
2. Additional components that support broadly applicable LET functionality and instructional capabilities based on specifications that are not yet standards.

SCORM 2.0 will have a modular, extensible architecture that will allow specific communities of practice to adapt and extend the model with functionality and innovations that are important for their particular situation (e.g., a new medical simulation standard or aviation-industry specific metadata). LETSI will play the leadership role in publicizing such extensions and will consider them for future inclusion in SCORM.

In mid-October, LETSI will host a 3-day SCORM 2.0 Workshop where participants will discuss alternative future learning technology solutions. The results will be incorporated in the next release of SCORM, which LETSI will announce at year’s end. It is expected that new products that are SCORM 2.0 conformant will begin to appear in late 2009.

LETSI is sponsored by a dozen organizations with commitments to SCORM and to the development of open learning technology standards. LETSI is organized as a program under the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization. For more information about LETSI, please visit: http://www.letsi.org.

LETSI’s White Paper Solicitation is available here.

For more information about the white paper solicitation and the SCORM 2.0 Workshop, visit: http://www.letsi.org/SCORM2/

I received a Google Alert this morning from Al Moser’s blog where he basically states it’s time to blast our thoughts of reusability, in terms of reusing content objects into other contexts, and instead focus on reuse of content across learning environments. I urge you to read the original post, but let me riff on Mr. Moser’s thought:

The SCORM philosophy will work best if we go back to its original purpose which was to ensure that you could re-use existing (compiled) content from one LMS to another; not from one COURSE to another, or from one authoring tool to another. Right now they are caught between trying to ensure that a course will work well on any LMS (therefore, it pretty much has to be static) and the Web 2.0 concepts of content aggregation in real time from multiple sources (thereby breaking LMS-independence)

I must admit I’m a little torn on the subject, because I don’t think that reusability of content into different contexts is impossible. I think it’s very difficult to pull off without the use of some aids in the form of applications, tools, search technologies and rigid presentation standards, admittedly none of which are used together today. But I can picture it. Others pictured it. Claude Ostyn and Phillip Dodds even pictured it. If you can see it, I’m tempted to believe you can build it when it comes to digital technology.

However, in stating this which I think is in direct opposition to Mr. Moser’s thought, I definitely agree that getting the E-Learning community over the hump of reusability is important, and this notion of redefining reusability by coupling it with “interoperability” isn’t a fragmentary notion. At the big SCORM Technical Working Group meeting, one of the ideas batted around for what to do next was to consider which “ilities” were really relevant.

I agree that it’s near impossible to reuse content in different contexts where we’re at now. We still can barely get tools we use all the time to work all the time. I mean, jeez… I defined Articulate and Quizmaker as a standard for my organization. And guess what? If you have special characters in your Quizmaker assessment, it can break your suspend data on closing the content, and thus it makes it look to the LMS like you didn’t complete content, even though you might have. So you work though that one issue and maybe you inserted a special character into the title of your content — which ends up as an attribute in your Metadata and in your Manifest — and that breaks your content. You fix that, but decide to put in multiple Quizmaker assessments into an Articulate Presentation, but you don’t want to use any of the assessments as a determining factor towards completion — which after much testing you find out will never leave a student’s enrollments because of some weird issue with how Quizmaker assessments are leveraged in Articulate Presenter.

I don’t mean to go off on a rant on issues Articulate has in Vendor X’s LMS. But I want to highlight the issues I see in just getting content from the same authoring tool, with the same code base, working in one LMS in a consistent manner with other pieces of content authored in the same tools and deployed to the same environment with the exact same code base.

See, my point is that as difficult as my scenario above is — I’m not trying to mix my content in with content possibly produced by somebody else — possibly not even built with Articulate. Even using certified SCORM products isn’t good enough. Articulate IS certified. Vendor X IS certified. But that doesn’t mean they work together out of the box.

So maybe for slightly different reasons, I agree with Al Moser about reusability. Because, from my vantage point, we can’t even talk about reusability — even at a technical level, until we can address interoperability. And frankly, we can’t talk about interoperability until we finally settle on compatibility.

Because at the end of the day, you just want the content you buy or build to work in the system you support. And if you’re building the content, this should be a science, not an art.

At work we’re upgrading from an older, sunset-ed version of our LMS to the latest service pack of the more recent version. We’ve been going through the upgrade for Vendor X for the past eight weeks, and up until last Thursday it was like a dream — nary a glitch to be found. We started the move on our Production server to make the switch last Thursday night, and that is when our tune took a sour note.

We’ve been experiencing a host of content issues — not SCORM communication issues, mind you. Content. Like, the first time you launch a course, everything works just right. If you close a course and it bookmarks your progress, logging back in (depending on the content) you get the interface, but you don’t get the actual content. In some courses, this breaks the content outright and there’s no way of getting it back.

At first, we were (I was) thinking it was some weird kind of security issue where it was treating Flash content recently run as a security risk and locking it out on subsequent sessions — but this was quickly dispelled, since multiple users could log in after the initial blockage and see all the content the first time they would experience it in their own login. Then, we thought that the scope of it was contained inside our firewall, so we started to divert traffic to our external content server — but that, too, started showing the same issues. So while it’s not ruled out as a factor, our network environment isn’t the only factor involved.

Currently we have a theory that there’s a security setting that’s scrubbing data sent to the LMS by content, escaping characters and such. And it’s doing that on content that is, on its own, escaping characters (like what Articulate does). And that may be underneath whatever Tomcat or IIS is doing to filter data for malicious strings. So, perhaps with all this filtering of the data, something breaks down when the feed comes back. We can trace the string coming back on consecutive data transactions with SCORM content and that’s definitely going on — pipes (|) are being sent the first time. Then, when they’re coming back, they’re URL-encoded. Then it looks like the URL encoding is changing the Ampersand (&) into something else… so it’s being URL-encoded in one place and then that URL encoding is being treated as a straight-up string by something else.

Which for you non-technical types — is un-good.

Everyone is working very diligently to figure this out, but I predict quite a few help desk calls today (I don’t get them, but I know they come). And with members of the team having invested so much time and effort, it’s a drag to see the snags come in so late in process.

I’m pretty confident that everything will be fixed — it’s only a matter of time, as are all things digital. But it’s a drag, and that is no doubt. It’s not a matter of finger-pointing — it’s not Vendor X’s slip-up or anyone’s negligence — this is just a point of pain that comes with enterprise software, especially since enterprise software generally has to be configured specially for an enterprise’s unique needs.

I know I’m not the first (nor will I be the last) to witness it, but I feel horrible for other members of the team who have put in so much time — only to find out they’re going to put in a lot more time

Projects Underway:

• LETSI - Beyond SCORM
  • Natural Evolution
  • From ADL
  • Adoption since 1997 has been enormous
  • Things were not designed back then to scale the way they need to now
  • Truly Global stewardship of SCORM
  • Taking over the responsibilities from ADL to be able to scale that support up
  • Charter, Governance, Infrastructure in the works now
  • Big things to emerge in 2008
  • Masie Consortium has given $10K to support LETSI, representing 250+ commercial organizations
  • Tom King is Masie’s delegate to LETSI.
• 3D Learning Project
  • Masie has paid to develop custom Second Life objects (islands, rooms, etc)
  • The “Compuserve” of virtual worlds
  • Not ready for corporate life, but there is a lot of innovation
  • Only Consortium members can come on to the Masie Island
  • Assets can be reused for free by any of the Consortium members
  • Interests in using Second Life as a narrative-based learning environment
  • Common thread — many of the people in organizations whose job is to research nextGen stuff has to do it from home, because nextGen stuff (Second Life, Facebook, Twitter) is blocked from corporate firewall.
• Voice of the Learner Survey
  • Looking for 10,000+ participation
  • Quick beta in November
  • Will aggregate member data for the member itself (separately) — for free.
  • The goal is that this happens every year.
  • Question this should answer: How is Learner Preference changing?
• Mobile Learning Project (iPhone+)
  • Judy Brown and Tom King
• Coaching & Mentoring
  • Stretch Assignments (Critical element in development)
  • Little scalability
• Performance Support
  • Interface issues
• Visual Front End of LMS

After an incredibly passionate and spirited discussion on Tuesday and Wednesday, the SCORM Technical Working Group made very few firm decisions about the scope of what we were going to do. Despite this, I would say that the meeting was by far one of the most enlightening, productive and I would argue “pivotal” TWG meetings since my initial involvement with ADL four years ago.

The world has changed since the merry band in the SCORM TWG assembled to cook up SCORM 2004 back in 2002. Back then, there was no YouTube. No Facebook. No MySpace. The iPod was a baby and hardly a product priced for the masses. Cellphones that had cameras were not at all ubiquitous in the US. Text messaging and web browsing certainly were not commonplace on mobile devices. WiFi was hard to find. People only played video games at work if they worked for a dotCom.

And, to be perfectly candid in my opinion, SCORM 2004 wasn’t so much about the way forward as it was fixing what everyone knew was still not right with SCORM 1.2.

It was pretty evident to me, at least, that this SCORM TWG meeting was as much about tidying up the loose ends still connected to SCORM 2004 as it was to start really thinking about what’s next for us in E-Learning. Should we do more of the same, but continue to make things more stable? How important is reusability of learning objects, or anything else we’ve been preaching for the past four years? This was the first SCORM TWG meeting that I attended in-person, and it was the largest attended meeting that I can remember, with the most diverse audience ever assembled. And the question that we’re all left to answer from this meeting isn’t so much “What are we saying to each other?” (We miss you P.D.), so much as it was….

“What do we want to do?”

The passing of both Phillip Dodds and Claude Ostyn this year is very sad, but the timing could not be more impactful (I don’t want to say ironic, but I don’t have a better word to describe it). With the IP issues as resovled as they’re going to be between ADL and IMS and the timetable so tight in order to resolve Simple Sequencing with IMS — we are all presented with a mission and an opportunity now that probably would not exist with the same shining lights leading us before. There were voices heard in this last meeting that have been largely silent before, and it’s a change that everyone has to get used to — but it’s a very good change.

The meeting highlighted how important the framers of online learning believe SCORM is, as it is. But I spoke about (and heard from many others), that there’s more to this picture — and that doesn’t necessarily mean we need to hold on to the past. We may not need to start from the ground up and press the “Reset” button on SCORM, but we also shouldn’t be afraid to do it, either.

We need to figure out what problems educators and learners are trying to work through, and what e-learning looks like in the near and longer-term. And… quite frankly, we need to figure out if that vision can be commercial enough for everyone involved to profit. The government is turning SCORM over to the community that uses it. It’ll be up to all of us to support it in some way. And while it’s a little scary, I think it’s an AWESOME thing. Because when that happens, everyone has ownership. Everyone has skin in the game to be committed to putting out the best specification we can open up to the world. And everyone has a voice in what the future of online learning can be.

I’m much more empowered now than I was before. I’m excited and humbled to be able to work with so many passionate and brilliant people on this. And I’m going to be reflecting quite a bit on how I see the future taking shape.

But the most important thing that all of us involved with SCORM need to know is what YOU think learning should be like. If you could wave the magic wand and participate (or simply consume) your training or learning however you wanted… what would it be? Please feel free to comment.

I’m at the SCORM Technical Working Group meeting and the first exciting thing I’ve heard so far has come from Valerie Smothers with MedBiquitous, talking about Virtual Patients — a model for reusable case studies to be exchanged for medical simulations around the world. Each Virtual Patient has metadata describing their patient data, media resoures, model for data availability, activities and the player that’s needed to play the simulation — that connects to the user interface, the learner profile and tracking.

And they are working with universities in Sweden (I think — maybe Finland) and the US on having working prototypes — and they work in SCORM-based Learning Management Systems.

After about a full day’s worth of talking about cleaning SCORM’s past, we finally get a taste for the future.

ADL, IMS signed an agreement

• SCORM 2004 is free of IP encumbrances
• Â ADL will cooperate with IMS on Simple Sequencing 1.1

SCORM 2004 4th Edition

• Minor release scheduled for mid-2008
• Fix Simple Sequencing 1.1 and a few critical bug fixes - stable for 2-3 years
• Merge SCORM 3rd Edition Sequencing and make it IMS Simple Sequencing 1.1
  • Anything that needs to be fixed, we are allowed to fix (including changing the schema, which we could not change before)
    • Interoperability issues
    • Navigation and User Interface issues that are documented and wrong.
    • When a learner completes a SCORM content package, there may be a need to get a score or progress information on a content package - possibly require LMSs to provide some kind of system-level access to ensure that progress is being reported accurately across all LMSs (not an IMS issue — firmly a TWG decision to fix).

Scope must be defined TODAY (in the bucket or out of the bucket)

• Anything we decide to fix must be fixed by the community, resulting in a robust set of recommendations that can be asserted by ADL technical team…Â due December 10, 2007 (another TWG Status meeting that week).
• The options for Sequencing Scope of work for the TWG:
  • IMS SS 1.1 is simply the merger of IMS SS 1.0 and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition.
  • IMS SS 1.1 is the merger of IMS SS 1.0 and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition plus fixes to known interoperability issues.
  • IMS SS 1.1 is the merger of IMS SS 1.0 and SCORM 2004 3rd Edition plus fixes to known interoperability issues and minor enhancements/editions

Points of discussion

• Navigation interoperability issues
• Interoperable way to access course status and other information AFTER course completion

Three hours later (and much spirited debate over the magnitude and scope of the possible courses of actions), we’ve decided to further investigate the Sequencing AND the Navigation issues.

Angelo Panar is heading up the sub-committee on Sequencing. John Campbell and I are heading up the sub-committee on Navigation.

LomPad is a Metadata generator for Windows, Mac and Linux that will simply generate all the metadata you need, either to the IEEE standard LOM (Learning Object Model) profile or, specifically for many of us, the SCORM 2004 profile.

It’s pretty straight up and easy to use so far. I’m looking forward to putting it through its paces. It’s default language is French, but there is support for English that you can turn on pretty easily from its menu options.