What can SCORM 2.0 Look Like?">What can SCORM 2.0 Look Like?
Continuing on my post from Wednesday…
Avron Barr asked members of LETSI to do some reality checking for him. He listed reasons (whether they’re a collective list or his own reasons, I can’t attribute) for moving beyond the SCORM as a reference model and using only accredited standards to a technology platform (remember: Linux for Learning) using informal standards and open source implementations.
- This is established industry practice, e.g., W3C, in situations of accelerated technology and business innovation.
- Group consensus, self-governance, and transparency allows more rapid innovation while maintaining interoperability where possible
- Sharing base code supports more consistent and less costly
- Lowers barriers to entry for innovative products, even more than standards themselves
- Supports architectural modularity and service-oriented infrastructure, which in turn supports product and market
- Dramatically reduces total community investment in software tools and infrastructure
I may be wrong, but I don’t recall Unix being an ISO or IEEE standard when Linus Torvalds was developing Linux in his pajama pants. Maybe it was. Maybe he had to ask a whole bunch of permission to even get to writing Linux. But I don’t think that’s how it happened. I think, much as the lore suggests, that he reached out to people he knew he could work with who were intelligent, productive and probably contrarian and as the project grew too big he just handed parts of the development out to the willing and trustworthy and it… just… came together. LETSI doesn’t have a Linus, but in a 2.0 world, maybe we don’t need one. At any rate, the point is this: if there are specs and standards that will help us do SCORM 2.0 faster and better, we should by any means necessary use them. But we shouldn’t be sitting around with our thumbs up our butts debating and negotiating if there are other models available that are just as useful and (keyword mentioned already) “available.”
Now, Avron also asked another question:
“What software would be open source? What is the platform layer equivalent to Linux? What are some examples that would be broadly useful without unduly interfering with commercial product developers?”
Avron went on to rattle off a number of technology ideas (products) that LETSI could address, but I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. What I’d like to do is answer Avron’s question with what I’m calling (to keep the meme going) the BAQON model:
The Baqon Model
The products LETSI can sponsor/support/steward may include ideas like Avron listed, such as:
- Reload Redux: Raw XML editor for the new content aggregation
- A migration tool from SCORM 2004 into the new format
- A testing harness for SCOs
- A modular testing harness for LMSs
- An multi-student “lobby” for a game or simulation with sample interfaces to student and content data services.
…but in any case, the “platform” as pictured above support the use-cases. That’s the vision. Some of these bulleted items may be part of the Learning, Education and Training (LET) pillar that supports the platform, some of them might be part of the platform itself. But in any case, the current players in LETSI are probably only going to be able to support the LET-specific pillar.
More on this subject in another forthcoming post…
I neglected to mention that the “pillars” I’ve identified are not a complete set. I would imagine that there are more pillars representing stores of information that other communities will want to mash-up LET data with. I can picture (and we’ve seen) quite a few use cases for the pillars identified in this diagram, but there are potentially a dozen other pillars — maybe more than that — and as they emerge hopefully the model I present here might come close to being applicable for those new use cases, too.
You’re on to it now. You’ve gone right past the need for a SKILLET spec. I do have a question though…pillars? I’m thinking that that layer need to be much more hot swappable…
Thanks for doing this Aaron.
I follow your blog religiously.
We should link to this thread from the LETSI wiki.
In agreement with the skillet. Much of todays systems are thought of in layers, top-down or down-up 1,2,3 sequencial appoaches. This the sequential step view. The Skillet or Cloud Round plays the view into the approach of integration of systems to overlap to focus on user-centric needs and systems data sharing.
Meat/Potatoes/Eggs/Ham/Vegetables – The Use Cases are the ‘Meat & Potatoes’ of what users will order to use, or what to order up to get from the interaction.
Lube/Seasoning – BaQon Platform is the conduit to the Skillet for the Food Ingredients.
Skillet(s) – the Talent Management, LET, Business Apps, etc. Not all skillets are equal, but they should all cook over an element of heat. Yes, there are more pillars which each kitchen, ideally would allow for a hook for integrations to hanging the Skillet on or another heating element to cook more food simultaneously as opposed to singular instances of one pot of food only.
…or maybe i am way of the cooker with this, since i have had only coffee this morning with no breakfast…
In full awareness that you wrote this two months ago, I have a question: What do you think of IMS Common Cartridge?
I’m not a SCORM fan. To be frank, I can’t stand it – the self-directed nature of the learning experience in 1.2 and 2004 is just too limited, and the complexity makes me crazy.
I’ve been impressed by the specs that CC have come up with – it looks very nice, and beautifully adaptable to emerging practice. I haven’t seen any cartridges in the wild yet, but what do you think? Has it got potential, maybe as an alternative to SCORM 2.0?
(Also – I may be out of date, but didn’t ADL decide that they weren’t going to let LETSI play with SCORM anymore?)
Zoe,
The IMS Common Cartridge spec will, if broadly adopted, solve the problems of textbook publishers, who need a consistent format for publishing learning materials and activities on the web. SCORM, on the other hand, had modularization and sharing as key design goals. These goals are not of interest to the textbook publishers, and they do make SCORM more complex than CC. SCORM also attempted to address the needs of communities that do not rely on textbooks or mass-published content, like enterprise training, where re-use and re-purposing of materials is an economic imperative.
The SCORM 2.0 project at LETSI is an attempt to re-think the general interoperability problem in light of changes in the way that technology is used in teaching and training and also incorporating modern web software practices and a greater awareness of the enterprise integration requirements for learning systems. The results will be very different from SCORM and Common Cartridge, which are both based on 10-year-old models. Also, all of the LETSI work is open and and freely available to all practitioners.
Finally, after LETSI’s October SCORM 2.0 Workshop, it became clear that the ADL should retain stewardship of SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004, as LETSI was going to start fresh and focus on their successor, as opposed to try to incrementally improve the existing SCORM versions.
Please see the LETSI blog, for the current thinking about LETSI and the Future of SCORM. The SCORM 2.0 Assumptions Document, just published, summarizes the results of the October Workshop and is the most current statement about what the successor to SCORM will be.
Hi Rose,
I would agree with Avron that CC vs SCORM is very much a question of horses for courses. My own perspective is that at the moment CC is tailored more for “expositive” learning materials, which may work well at HE, but has only a limited contribution to make at K-12 (the focus of my interest). Which is not to say, of course, that CC is not in the process of developing to meet the challenges at K-12.
Personally, I have never accepted the view that SCORM imposes a self-directed model on learning – this has always seemed to me to be an implementation issue rather than a standards issue (I developed a SCORM-compliant LMS which focused very heavily on teacher assignment). On the other hand, I think that everyone would accept that SCORM 2004 imposed a “solitary learner” model and this is something that SCORM 2.0 needs to sort out.
As for the complexity issue, I don’t agree with your implication, Rose, that the basic technology has to be kept simple. I like the line used by Diane Laurillard, a bit of a guru here in the UK: “E-learning isn’t rocket science – it’s much more complicated than that”. Why should we expect to have simple technology to meet a very demanding requirement? None of the consumer electronics which fill our homes are simple by *design* – they are just simple to *use*. Which is exactly how it should be.
So if you found SCORM hard to use, Rose, then I suspect that the problem was with a lack of good tools, rather than with the underlying standards. The gap between complexity of design and simplicity of use is what you pay implementers to fill. I think we all recognise that in the development of new interoperability, really good tools and implementations are critical, both to SCORM and CC.
But what I think is most important to keep hold of in this kind of SCORM vs CC discussion, is that they are both probably just temporary variants in a common project, both only a very short way down the path to providing the same levels of robust, highly functional, easy-to-use interoperability that we all take for granted in other areas of our experience with technology.
Crispin.
Thank you both so much – those are very useful answers!
I am, in fact, in publishing, and I deal daily with other publishers who find SCORM (especially 2004) terrifying. We have all had difficulty identifying the best tools – currently I am using/recommending the Reload editor, and we are about to implement the Icodeon SCORM player. Am I missing out on something better? (with reload, I bet I am…)
Crispin – you’re right, technology does not have to be simple on the inside to be useable on the inside. But I encounter a substantial lack of expertise among publishers in managing the ‘inside’ bit – there’s a little kicking & screaming going on in the industry re. moving online (lots of people are still publishing only cd-roms, for example), and an industry-wide lack of institutional skills. Until that rights itself (which it will), I think Avron’s comment about CC being better for publishers will hold true. (Also – if you ever feel bad about using ten-year-old technology, have a look at the universal library catalogue standard MARC – the spec was written in 1964! Actually I have an old blog post about that – http://metadatamonkey.blogspot.com/2009/01/demon-marc.html)
You’ve left me with more questions, though – I really did think that SCORM was fundamentally averse to creation on-the-hop – am I wrong, or am I right and this is something you’re hoping to address in SCORM 2.0? It would be lovely to see an easy-to-use packaging technology that could satisfy the ‘tweaking’ instinct that all teachers seem to be born with…
Will there even be a relationship between LETSI and ADL? And also – if I’m not being cheeky – is this new creation SCORM 2.0 really SCORM at all?
You might be interested in an EU project called ASPECT that’s running at the moment – it’s about increasing use of standards by creators of electronic educational content, in metadata and packaging, and will be teasing out a lot of interoperability issues. Both the SCORMs and CC are being assessed in depth. It IS an EU project, though, so don’t expect anything accessible! http://aspect.eun.org/
Thanks again, Zoe