Monthly Archive for February, 2004

http://www.geminfo.org/Evaluation/Fitzgerald_03.06.pdf

Before there were ‘learning object repositories,’ educators were already trying to catalogue instructionally useful Internet resources in ’subject-based catalogues’ or gateways. In the K-12 world, one of the more significant of these has been the Gateway to Educational Materials, or GEM. This report, from last June, evaluates the successfulness of the GEM project and provides some insight into what repository users might be looking for and problems they might face based on qualititative research done with 50 or so users. There’s nothing necessarily that revolutionary here, but it’s a good reminder to not re-invent the wheel and make mistakes that may already have been made before in similarly-motivated projects. Thanks to Solvig for pointing this out. - SWL

http://careo.prn.bc.ca/losc/losccourse.html

From Gerry Paille and his team (a partnership of BC School District #60, Open School BC and the Open Learning Agency/BC Open Univeristy to develop a ‘CANCORE-compliant’ resource network that will house materials from some of their older resource collections) comes this useful 3 module course on “using a structured language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as a basis for producing a learning design and describing course content, activities, and assignments.”

Gerry has also gone to the effort of packaging the course as an IMS 1.1.3 Content Package. Gerry notes on the project blog that the course has yet to receive a ‘technical review’ but is still quite worthwhile. One neat feature of how they implemented this is the ‘Module Resources’ links in each of the modules, which seem to be keyword searches to the backend CAREO database to provide related supplementary resources for each module. - SWL

http://dotlrn.mit.edu/

There’s been a fair bit of buzz, and rightly so, for a few of the open source CMS systems out there; both Moodle and ATutor have come a long way and are increasingly looking like viable options for those wanting to go the open source route.

There’s another open source CMS that has been around for a little while now that hasn’t received as much press, but seems to me to also be an increasingly viable choice. The .LRN system is based on a fairly ‘old’ (by Internet standards) platform, the OpenACS portal server. It has been developed by folks at MIT (Sloan School of Management) and the University of Heidelberg and has been taken up by a number of major adopters.

They recently reached a major milestone with the release of version 2.0. One feature of particular note to this audience is support for student blogging tools - that’s right, unlike attempts to re-purpose sole-purpose blogging tools as ‘course management systems’ (which I think gives seriously short shrift to the breadth of functionality offered in ‘real’ CMS) this is instead a fairly full featured CMS that offers individual student blogging support.

The current system is a little light on assessment functionality, but there are plans to rectify that in the near future. These folks are clearly aware of existing instructional standards and already support IMS Enterprise 1.1 for exchanging student data, with Content Packaging and SCORM support on the horizon. And given the relatively long history of development around OpenACS, there is already a fairly broad development community built up around this platform.

We just finished our draft review at Edutools - the review should be visible here in the next day or so. - SWL

http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EdTechPost/
LearningObjectRepositorySoftware

There’s a lot of lists of learning object repositories around - to name but a few good ones, there’s

• the database of repositories that the good folks at the ADL Co-Lab have recently released,
• Joe Hart’s EduResource portal is fast becoming an authoritative resource on the topic
• and there’s Patricia McGee’s collection done as NLII work.

The problem, for me, with many of these lists is that these typically don’t make any distinction between instances of existing repositories that are hosted by specific institutions or consortia (’collections’ if you will) and repository software projects - software that one can download and install in one’s own environment, and integrate with one’s own systems if that’s important to you.

Well it’s important to me for a variety of reasons - within the context of the BCcampus lor project we are definitely looking for software that we will run and host in BC, and in the context of the Edutools team we are looking at doing some work that will allow people to do a comparative analysis of this kind of software.

So to that end, the above URL points to an evolving list of packages one might consider if you had to implement a learning object repository. A few final notes on this list and my approach:

• for the purposes of initially identifying as much as possible, I have included not only software that is specifically identified as LOR software, but also more commercial LCMS software, institutional repository software coming out of the library/archives world, and CMS software that implements either a repository or LCMS component
• I have not made a huge distinction between learning object metadata repositories and learning object content repositories though I recognize there are crucial differences.

It’s a wiki page so feel free to add to it. It isn’t exhaustive when it comes to LCMS or institutional repositories, but I think there are strong cases to be made that these are different beasts, and that while either can be made to fill the LOR role, there may be good reasons not to do this. - SWL

Two weeks without a post deserves some explanation, and the reasons for my recent absence are both not so good and really great. First the not so good news - I just got out of hospital after another bout with Crohn’s Disease. I luckily managed to escape the surgeon’s knife for now (having had the good fortune of meeting a surgeon reluctant to operate!) and we’re hoping that a new course of medication and a new diet will help things in the long term. I am almost back up to speed now, so here’s keeping my fingers crossed!

But the other reason for the lack of posts is that I’ve been extremely busy with what I’ll call the “great news” - at the start of February I embarked on a brand new project with the folks at BCcampus, Open School BC and a group dedicated to Telelearning-in-Health across the 5 BC Universities. I am project managing the implementation (and I stress that word) of a learning object repository infrastructure that will serve the needs of these varied communities in B.C. It’s been in the works for a little while now, but I wanted to wait until it was firmly under way before announcing it. We’ve got a fairly aggressive timeline (project is scheduled to end September 2004) and so we are ramping up right now to identify key requirements and assess the existing open source options. It is a hugely exciting opportunity both in the work I’ll get to do and in the people I’ll get to work with - the various partners involved end up touching most of the educational institutions in BC in one way or other, and there is just a ton of great experience across this province to tap into.

I am fortunate that these folks agreed to a 4-day-a-week-deal which will allow me to keep working with my friends and colleagues at Edutools - we continue to add new reviews of Course Management Systems there, and are also looking to some exciting new projects in the near future, so I’m really pleased to be able to work on both projects.

So hopefully you’ll start to see more posts again, though at the current pace of things will likely still be a bit sporadic. I expect I’ll end up publishing a project-based blog for the LOR implementation, if only for my own tracking purposes, and when I do I’ll share that URL as well. - SWL

http://www.iprsystems.com/COLIS/COLIS-ODRL-Profile-06.pdf

Out of the Australian-based COLIS project was produced this metadata profile for using ODRL to express the rights for learning objects in IMS Content Packages. This was originally published about 18 months ago, but still seems useful, and as far as I can tell hasn’t been supplanted.

The COLIS Project (renamed and extended as the “Interaction of IT Systems and Repositories” or IIS&R Project) seems to have finished much of its work this past December, and is now engaging in a series of tours around Australia to disseminate its findings. A number of reports and presentations are available on their site - of particular interest to me was a presentation on the “‘Use and Useability of Learning Objects within the COLIS Demonstrator Framework.” It is interesting to see the similarities in the difficulties it outlines (cataloguing time, standard vocabularies, versioning, DRM issues) to other existing projects. SWL

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september03/
gadd/09gadd.html#Gadd-2003f

This interesting paper details the efforts of the RoMEO project to land on, amongst other things, a digital rights schema to enable self-archiving of academic research papers in the U.K. What’s interesting is that while they found that either the Creative Commons or ODRL could possibly fit their needs, the problem with the CC solution was that their metadata was expressed in RDF/XML and did not have an associated XML schema—a prerequisite for any metadata disclosed under the OAI-PMH. Their solution was to develop ODRL versions (XML instances) of the CC licences that would conform to the ODRL XML schema, examples of which can be found in the paper. A more detailed accounting of this process can also be found in the related paper, “Rights metadata for open archiving.” - SWL

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/portole/index.htm

Site for the “Providing Online Resources To Online Learning Environments (PORTOLE)” project, which ended July 2003. This UK-based project aimed to help incorporate more library resources and tools into ‘virtual learning environments.’ Of particular interest to me was the CROSsearch prototype, which provides a single search interface to a number of library catalogues, learning object repositories AND, optionally, Google. Is this the way forward? I don’t know, but it is invaluable to have prototypes like this to examine in more depth and take this out of the abstract realm.

Additionally, you can read the project’s final report, and the latest issue of ARIADNE (out today) contains an article summarizing some of the project’s key findings. - SWL

Ridiculously long URL

From the European Committee on Standardization’s Learning Technology Workshop comes this registry of taxonomies and vocabularies for use in European learning object (and other, presumably) initiatives. There seems to be currently about 24 simple vocabularies or value lists and 4 thesauri. - SWL

http://www.opensector.org/1075490138

From OpenSector comes news of the U.N. report, “E-Commerce and Development Report 2003″ which contains a chapter that supports many of the canonical arguments for why open source projects produce better software than proprietary projects. Another good URL to have in your pocket when the boss asks you why you decided to deploy Linux (or some other FOSS choice in the myriad of applications now available) over some of the other alternatives. - SWL