5 Learning Content - LIFE Roadmap Project

Written By Sheila Macneil, Paul Hollins and Adam Cooper CETIS

1. Introduction

This chapter looks at the domain of educational content and tries to give an overview of some of the current issues in this field. There are multiple stakeholders within this domain, and a large degree of cross over with other areas discussed in other chapters of this publication such as repositories, assessment and learning activity.

2. State of the art concerning standards and interoperability

There are a number of success stories in terms of interoperability standards for learning content. One of the most significant developments in terms of interoperability has been the IMS Content Packaging Specification. This specification has had wide spread adoption within the e-learning and digital repositories sector; and of course the ADL SCORM is based on the specification. The specification allows for the storage, description, structure and transportation of content. The current public release of the specification in v1.1.4, with work on v1.2 ongoing and it is due to be publicly released in early 2008. This is likely to be the last major release of the specification from IMS as v1.2 is being put forward to IEEE for official standardization.
IMS are now developing an application profile of Content Packaging called Common Cartridge. The Common Cartridge is a constrained profile of IMS Content Packaging integrating QTI and LOM. It is hoped that this approach will overcome some of the remaining interoperability issues which exist between LMS's, even when they claim to be implementing the IMS Content Packaging specification.
"The Common Cartridge will define a commonly supported content format, able to run on any compliant LMS platform. It will enable content providers to achieve lower production costs whilst expanding the effective market by eliminating platform dependency. This will both stimulate production by larger content providers and open up the market to their smaller counterparts. The LMS providers in turn, will have a stronger business case to take to their customers, as schools, colleges, universities, training departments and certification programs will have available a broader catalog of offerings reaching deeper into the curriculum." (http://www.imsglobal.org/commoncartridge.html)
One strength of the Common Cartridge Initiative is that it is being backed by a number of prominent educational publishers. If they produce content in this new format, then this will create a need for systems to be able to process content created in this format.
The ADL SCORM is now also widely adopted outside of its military origins into the educational sector, particularly in the US and Asia. In 2007 the ADL announced that it would like to transfer governance and stewardship of the SCORM into the wider learning community. At the time of writing no formal decisions have been made as to how this will actually be realised, but further information on initial discussions is available from the ADL community website http://adlcommunity.net/course/view.php?id=18.

3. Demands, requirements and use cases

The are many stakeholders within the educational content domain from end users such as students and teachers through to software developers, publishers, system developers and standards bodies. All of these stakeholders have their own unique needs. However, they are all in some way at least partially connected. Interoperability of systems and content is a key factor for success for each. For a publisher they need their content to work in as many systems as possible without the need for creating multiple versions, for students/lecturers they want to be able to access content as easily as possible.

4. Relationship with services/components

There is growing interest in the relationship between content and services particularly through such initiatives as the international e-Framework, which is endeavoring to promote a service orientated approach to web based developments within the learning, e-science and e-administration sectors. In terms of content development, the use of services is at an early stage. A service orientated approach does afford opportunities to integrate for example sequencing engines into content workflows, as illustrated by the ASSIS project which investigated the use of IMS Simple Sequencing within the development of games based content. Other web 2.0 developments are discussed in the next section.

5. Trends and issues

5.1 Open Content
One movement which has implications for the development of learning content is that of open content. For example the MIT Opencourseware initiative and the more recent UK based OpenLearn from the OUUK. There is no definitive description for open content it is general assumed to be content which is freely available, with liberal icensing to allow reuse and repurposing such as Creative Commons. The adoption of this type development process, which can appear at first glance as very attractive, particularly for the educational sector, does require a significant investment both in development process and also in shifting cultural attitudes towards the use of 'free' content. Many teachers are happy to use others content but not share their own, or conversely do not want to use 'free' content as it may not always have the same perceived value of bought content. It is interesting to note that the two projects mentioned earlier were brought about with large sums of funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation - if that funding had not been in place, it can be reasonably asked, would those projects exist?
Recently the EC has funded a body to monitor and help foster the development of the open content movement, OCOS (Open eLearning Content Observatory Services). In early 2007 OCOS produced a roadmap to "provide decision makers with an overview of current and likely future developments . . . and recommendations on how various challenges could be addressed." The roadmap provides a comprehensive overview of the state of open content development at the present time.

  5.2 User generated content and Web 2.0
The advent of web2.0 technologies has potentially many implications for the development, reuse and sharing of learning content. One of the biggest developments in the web2.0 space is that of 'user-generated content' and the proliferation of social spaces for sharing content such as flickr, youtube, myspace to name but a few. These sites have turned the notion of publishing on its head as users now can easily create and upload their own content and create new communities for sharing. The potential for rich, interactive, highly collaborative content creation presents new paradigms for teaching and learning and the role of content delivery and creation. It also presents challenges for educational content standards and specifications as this new paradigm relies on the use and development of web services which are browser based, and do not require specialised systems such as VLE for access. However commercial forces are at work in this arena with large corporations buying social spaces (such as Newscorp with MySpace) and increasingly closing down the number of services that can be used within these environments.
On the other hand, the notion of content mash ups (that is the ability to mix content from one source easily with multiple other sources) does offer educators increased flexibility over content and, it could be argued allows the development of a 'push/pull content' model where services such as RSS allows content to be pushed out (or pulled in) to aggregators. Combine this with the recent development of visual editors such as Yahoo!pipesand customising feeds for particular curriculum areas becomes more in the realm of non developers. As Scott Wilson raised in a recent JISC CETIS discussion forum, we are now in an era where people are producing connected as opposed to interactive content
"we have entered an era of connected media. Connected media   does not contain interaction instead content items are nodes in a network of connections that are the focus of interaction. The content is inside-out. The hot content today is not interactive - Flickr/ Photobucket, YouTube, iTunes, RSS feeds all feature non-interactive, yet highly connected via layers of interlinked metadata (del.icio.us, technorati, recommendations, hyperlinks, comments..."
(http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0702&L=cetis-ecsig&T=0&X=607BFE2D3D7B43D774&Y=s.macneill%40strath.ac.uk&P=2448)
The use of webservices needs monitoring as although at the moment many services are free, as noted, commercial forces are increasing in this area.   All content developers need to be aware that the status of a free service could change literally overnight, and access to their content could change.

5.3 Virtual worlds and gaming -
There is significant interest amongst educators in Europe in the potential application of digital games, or digital games technologies and in the use and affordances of Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE).
Many European Higher Education (25 March 2007) institutions have established a virtual presence in the most widely used MUVE in education , "Second Life" (Over 46% of those registered do so form a European connection with France having the highest number of registered users, February 2007 ) There are a wide number of educational projects in Second Life and the "teen grid", an under eighteen section of Second Life, including the "global kids" project. For a comprehensive listing of current educational activity in MUVE please refer to http://www.simteach.com/
The use of MUVE presents real pedagogic and interoperability challenges to educators across a number of domains including Accessibility, Assessment, Authentication and validation, network capability, security, the proprietary nature and in the existing business models of developers .
There are projects exploring the relationship between these kinds of applications and existing institutional systems, IMS Simple sequencing in games and the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) in MUVE. One of the most interesting and challenging projects is the current work undertaken by Livingstone and Kemp (2007) with the "Sloodle" project , a "mashup" of the open source virtual learning environment (VLE) Moodle and Second Life. they argue that both environments provide largely complimentary affordances.
Work across these domains is still very much at the exploratory stage.

5.4 Mobile Learning
There is increasing demand for content to be able to be delivered in as wide a number of devices as possible; and particularly to mobile devices such as PDAs, telephones etc. This is often referred to as m-learning. In terms of interoperability, this trend presents a new set of challenges for content developers due to the sheer plethora of devices which are available on the market place. Studies have shown that the use of mobile technologies can have a positive impact on learning. The JISC 'Innovative Practice with e-Learning' Guide showcases a number of case studies where mobile technologies have been successfully integrated within the educational settings. Producing content for m-learning usually still involves creating a different version that would be used in a VLE or digital repository. Software developers (notably Macromedia) are developing products which can produce content for a variety of devices but interoperability still needs much work in this area.

5.5 Accessibility
The role of accessibility of content cannot be overlooked within this discussion. All of the above trends are based on notions of user centeredness, and with the increasing trend towards personalization of learning it is vital that content is created in an accessible way to ensure that end users have the widest possible range of options over where, how and when they access content. The Accessibility chapter covers these issues in more detail.

6. Stakeholders Concerns/Issues (technical, semantical)

As mentioned earlier, there are many stakeholders within the content arena including standards/specification bodies, publishers, repositories, VLE/LMS vendors, content developers, software developers, educational institutions, lecturers, educational technologist and learners.
Although there have been significant technical advances for the means of storing and transporting content with the development of specifications such as IMS CP, CC, QTI and Learning Design and the SCORM; there are still many barriers to interoperability due in part to the flexible nature of specifications which allow for degrees of flexibility in implementation. Developments of events such as the JISC CETIS codebashes have helped to some extent in that they provide an opportunity for developers to come together and test systems/content. The outcomes of these events can be (and have) reported back to specification bodies to for incorporation in the specification development process.
In terms of semantics, there are a number of significant issues. The LOM still presents many challenges in actual implementation. Contextual metadata continues to be of increasing importance with the educational context - how someone used a piece of content is often more important than the description of it. This brings with it the added challenge of finding appropriate vocabularies to describe learning which are shared between the teaching and learning community and the system development community. The JISC Pedagogical Vocabularies Project produced three reports which explore the potential for identification, development and use of pedagogical vocabularies for the UK post-16 and HE communities. Despite being a UK based project, many of the issues it highlights have resonance within other countries; particularly the need to develop commonly understood and shared pedagogical vocabularies.
In terms of user-generated content we are now in the era of the folksonomy, which wikipedia describes as: "a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags."( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy.) This user centred approach may well be a more successful way to provide meaningful metadata for users (particularly in an educational context) but it does perhaps present some other challenges for interoperability when compared to an internationally recognised standard such as the LOM.

7. Interoperability Scenario

It is relatively simple for content to be produced and tagged in an interoperable format and then stored either in a digital repository or a VLE/LMS - or both. The proposed IMS Common Cartridge format promises the ability for consistency of display within systems. The development of open source tools such as RELOAD, have played a significant part in allowing the community to reach this stage of maturity. There are still some issues with interoperability of other types of content such as IMS Learning Design (which will be discussed in the next section) and some user generated content such as blogs and wikis. The curation issues of the later types of content (particularly with the education context) have fully to be explored. What happens to the content within a wiki used in classroom setting when that session ends? Is it deleted, saved, stored? Does it have a persistent identity (crucial for the notion of the semantic web) Can that be done easily? Who owns the content? These are just some of the issues which need further investigation and interoperability testing.

8. Relationship with the adoption life cycle

In many respects the creation of interoperable content is at a fairly mature stage. However there are some notable exceptions, particularly relating to the more sophisticated use of standards/specifications such as IMS Learning Design and IMS QTI. Although both these specifications use IMS Content Packaging to store and transport content, there is still a lack of repositories and learning management systems which are able to preview and/or run the content.
The relationship between content and webservices is again at an early stage as described earlier in this chapter. The development of technologies such as Yahoo!pipes are making content 'mashing' easier, however this technology is at a very early stage and it is still unclear what kind of an impact it will have within education.
There are also cultural issues surrounding the sharing and repurposing of content which still need resolved. The notion of people repurposing content has not materialized to the extent as some expected a number of years ago.

9. Recommendations.

Monitor the development of the IMS Common Cartridge initiative to see if it does offer greater interoperability between content and systems and how widespread any adoption/update is.
Monitor the development, uptake and impact of open content initiatives.
Encourage more research into the use of services and web 2.0 technologies within content development.
Encourage more research into pedagogical vocabulary development.
Encourage continued interoperability testing between systems to ensure a bottom up input into standards developments.