Standards and eLearning: a changing landscape - or new

ways of navigating the technology map

Sheila MacNeill

Assistant DirectorJISC CETIS

Map of web-trends

http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-4-final-beta/

Standards make all this stuff work . . .

Overview of presentation

Background information on CETIS and our work Business case for using standards Some emerging trends for current work in the UK Questions

What is CETIS?

Centre for Educational

Technology and

Interoperability

Standards

JISC Innovation Support Centre providing advice to the UK Higher and Post-16 Education sectors on educational technology and standards.

About CETIS cont Partnership between:

University of Bolton (10) University of Strathclyde (4) Heriot Watt University (1) Bangor/Bolton (3)

What is JISC? Joint Information Systems Committee “JISC inspires UK colleges and universities in the

innovative use of digital technologies, helping to maintain the UK position as a global leader in education.”

JISC provides: A world-class network - JANETAccess to electronic resources New environments for learning, teaching and research Guidance on institutional change Advisory and consultancy services

(http://www.jisc.ac.uk)

JISC - Six Strategic Aims

Innovative and sustainable ICT infrastructure, services and practice that support institutions in meeting their mission

promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT to support learning and teaching

promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT to support research

promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT within institutions and in support of their management

developing and implementing a programme to support institutions' engagement with the wider community

continuing to improve its own working practices

CETIS mission statement

Through active engagement with the JISC Community, develop, and facilitate effective implementations and use of, the open standards needed to: implement flexible and adaptive learning environments, learning services and learning resources; increase the choice of available systems and software by helping to maintain a healthy open market; and support the development of the capabilities and good practices within our community

CETIS: Key Aim 1

To establish interoperability specifications, standards and application profiles that meet the needs of the JISC community.

Identify the interoperability needs of the F/HE sectors and any other sectors that may join the JISC community.

Work with international standards bodies to ensure as far as possible that the Specifications and Standards they produce will meet those needs.

Work with the community, and with implementers of systems for the community, to agree Application Profiles that tailor existing specifications to meet community specific needs.

CETIS: Key Aim 2 To promote and support the understanding, implementation, effective use

and adoption of open learning technology specifications and standards. Disseminate information about specifications, standards and application

profiles to the community and its suppliers, supported by information about the tasks and changes involved and the costs of adopting and using them, with comparisons, where possible, of the costs of not using them.

Develop a consensus among stakeholders on what should be adopted. Work with implementers, including commercial vendors, open source

developers and those engaged in JISC programmes, through advice, plugfests and conformance testing (when available), to ensure implementations are consistent and achieve working interoperability.

Support, the UK FE and HE community in building the knowledge and capacity, and in developing good practice.

CETIS: Key Aim 3 Cooperate with others nationally and internationally to ensure that the above

aims are, as far as possible, realised in a common way, and to contribute to the tasks involved in establishing interoperability and general adoption by working in partnership with others.

Negotiate with others to identify common needs and to then work to produce specifications and standards to meet those needs in a common way, possibly working across several specification and standards bodies.

Where the specifications and standards produced do not meet the community needs, work with others to produce common application profiles to reduce, as far as possible, unnecessary variations of specifications and standards for similar purposes.

Identify bodies, both in the UK and internationally, whose needs & tasks overlap with those of JISC- CETIS, the JISC and the wider community and develop co-operation, either through sharing the effort or through funding one body to carry out a task on behalf of others.

Participate in government advisory and other groups as appropriate.

CETIS: Key Aim 4

Work closely with the JISC, providing input to and supporting the successful realisation of its strategies, programmes and activities with respect to all aspects of standards-based learning technology, and ensure that JISC and JISC-CETIS strategies and activities are aligned for maximum effectiveness.

CETIS: Key Aim 5

Develop and maintain effective and efficient working practices

CETIS and Standards

In the beginning there was IMS . . .

Content packaging Metadata Assessment (QTI) Portfolio Learning design And then there was web 2.0 . . .

CETIS & community engagement

Old model - SIGs Accessibility Assessment Educational Content (EC) Enterprise Metdata & Digital

Repositories (MDR) Porfolio

Pedagogy Forum LLL group

Emerging model - Working Groups

Widgets Semantic technology Cloud computing QTI profile Competencies watch this space

CETIS and standards cont

Maturing community/standards/implementations Working groups allow for community driven development

e.g. XCRI Widgets (Wookie Apache Incubator/ W3C) Learner information/ competencies (CEN/ISO)

Moving to towards more web-service based approaches Underlying EA (enterprise architecture) Cloud computing Linked Data

http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk

Why take a standards based approach? CETIS Briefing: Assessing the Business Case for

Standards: An introduction for strategy planning and resourcing committees

7 Key Roles for Information Standards

Cost savings and quality improvement Reduced maintenance cost and disruption Durability of data Avoidance of supplier lock-in Easier development paths A platform for collaboration Whole system economies

Where/when to use standards

What (open) standards to use? Education specific or generic?

Need to understand your infrastructure - enterprise architecture

Need to understand your users Standards should be invisible to end users Use and development can be driven from bottom up as

well as top-down

Some drivers for standards and activity in the UK Open content - JISC/HEA OER pilot programme Content packaging standards, metadata application profiles and

controlled vocabularies have not been mandated. Projects have been told what information about a resource must be

created but not how to create it. Content must be released under an open license (strong steer towards CC).

All resources must be represented in JorumOpen. Use of multiple delivery platforms is encouraged. Use of RSS / Atom also encouraged. Opportunity to find out what projects will actually use when given

freedom.

Some drivers for standards and activity in the UK

JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes Course description/information

(XCRI)/competencies - life long learning/work based learning agendas

Human processes around technical integration

Some drivers for standards and activity in the UK

Flexible Service Delivery programme - potential to develop shared services

Some drivers for standards and activity in the UK

Extending learning environments - e.g widgets /plug-in (wookie widget server, IMS LTI)

How to adapt institutional learning environments

And finally . . .

Standards are a “good thing’ but need to be driven by community needs and engagement

Education can’t exist in isolation, but needs to be mindful of its unique requirements

Everything changes Need to be flexible and open in our attitudes and

with our data

Preguntas

Contact info

Contact info: Email: s.macneill@strath.ac.uk Twitter: sheilmcn Blog: http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/sheilamacneill/

Links and references

CETIS webpage: http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk JISC webpage: http:www.jisc.ac.uk Assessing the Business Case for Using Standards

briefing http://jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/bpbusinesscaseforstandards.aspx

Wookie: http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/ XCRI: http://www.xcri.org/wiki/index.php/XCRI_Wiki