IMS-LD, progress and prospects

IMS-LD, progress and prospects8th Nov 06, IMS LD Summit Heerlen, Dai Griffiths

IMS-LD, progress and prospects

Dai Griffiths. CETIS, The University of Bolton


8th Nov 06, IMS LD Summit Heerlen, Dai Griffiths

What is the context for IMS LD in the overall development of learning technology?

What work is being done at present, and who is funding it?

What are the immediate challenges?



Once upon a time before IT…Technology was easy to use, flexible, and paper was interoperable

But it didn’t help teachers to manage variety

Flexibility

Ease of use

Interoperability

Variety Mgt.



Along came CD ROM and the big change: the Web

Teachers get some help in managing variety, but have to pay for it elsewhere

Flexibility

Ease of use

Interoperability

Variety Mgt.



VLE’s to the rescue!

You get ease of use, and can handle learner info, but you pay for it in flexibility and interoperability

Flexibility

Ease of use

Interoperability

Variety Mgt.



IMS LD provides interoperable flexible pedagogies, is fine for large scale distance education, but …

But can only be authored & run by technical experts

Flexibility

Ease of use

Interoperability

Variety Mgt.

Potential

Potential



Current initiatives are trying to drag the bars over.

More flexible infrastructure, better authoring tools and runtime, and so (?) more interoperable UOLs

Flexibility

Ease of use

Interoperability

Variety Mgt.



Who is funding and carrying out work on IMS LD ?

•JISC

•European Commission

•Individuals and institutions



JISC has played a key role

• “Joint Information Systems Committee” for Higher Education in the UK

• “Top sliced” funding, currently some £66m per year

• Roughly half to run the JANET network

• Funds projects, including JISC Service at CETIS



JISC e-Learning Programme has four main strands

• e-Learning pedagogy

• e-Learning framework and tools

• Innovations in e-learning

• Distributed e-learning

140 projects funded so far (6 months to 3 years)

Budget has risen to £10m per year

www.elearning.ac.uk and www.jisc.ac.uk



The e-Framework (with Australia DEST)

• An ambitious attempt to model the whole of higher education as a set of distributed services

• Services are technical components from which applications can be built

• The vision is to reuse services flexibly in a range of institutions, and reduce costs

• Advocates open standards based specifications

www.e-framework.org



Distributed eLearning Strand

Overlaps with the eFramework

The main support for IMS LD in JISC

• SLeD (service based LD player)

• D4LD (Developing for Learning Design)

• Wcker Reload wizard

• Related work (LAMS evaluation and a number of other significant reports)



Now I’ll hand over to my colleague Sheila MacNeill, who’ll give an overview of the Design For Learning programme.

Overview of JISC Design for Learning Programme

Sheila MacNeill JISC CETIS

What is it?

• 2 year project - till May 2008

• Part of the pedagogy strand of the JISC eLearning Programme

• Learning design in wide context - not just IMS LD

Exploring

• the process of designing, planning,sequencing or orchestrating of learningtasks which may include the use of e-Learning tools.

• practitioner focus to help make effective decisions about the use of e-Learning,help support the effective design and use of learning design tools.

Programme aims

To: further develop the community’s

Understanding of the principles that

inform the design of effective learning

activities which involve the use of technology.

Projects

• 14 projects in total

• Models of Practice (1)

• Pedagogic Planner (2)

• Implementation Projects (5)

• Technical Development Projects(4)

• Support project (CETIS)

• Evaluation Project (Glenaffric Ltd)

LD4P, Led by Liverpool Hope

Aims1. develop an interface to an IMS LD authoring tool

suitable for use by teaching practitioners2. produce learning designs, investigate sharing

Objectives1. evaluate the RELOAD IMS LD editor with

practitioners2. produce a prototype user interface3. investigate implementation of the user interface4. produce IMS LD units of learning in a variety of

situations5. investigate re-use of IMS LD units of learning

Developing for Learning Design (D4LD)

Finishes 31st Oct 2007

Aims and Objectives• Produce a stable Learning Design player to:• Provide access to LD courses for students• Integrate with LDs produced by other projects• Offer a component within the design for learning

framework

Support project• Provide technical and pedagogic expertise in learning

design to the projects and the programme to support

the process of design for learning.• Enable the sharing of expertise in design for learning,• Support the establishment of communities, services

and resources to promote and sustain effective practice in design for learning.

Some early issues

• Exemplar designs - differences between ‘inspirational’ and ‘runnable’ designs

• Representation of designs for practitioners• Searching criteria - peer value & FOAF• IMS LD way of mapping all

representations

Links

• More information @

• http://dfl.cetis.ac.uk/ - programme support wiki

• http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/elp_designlearn.aspx

http://dfl.cetis.ac.uk/



European Commission

The Commission is sympathetic, and supports open standards. It will expect to see a policy on standards, but will not impose any particular specifications.

eContent Plus programme, 149 m (running to 2008) specifically mentions that projects should support the use of open standards. Not particularly focused on eLearning.



Framework Programme 6 (FP6)

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL): 60m Euros, closed 2005. FP 7 is being planned now.

Current projects include:

TENCompetence (Integrated Project)

Developing sytems using IMS LD (more on this in a later slide). 4 Years, 14 m € budget

www.tencompetence.org



Prolearn (Network of Excellence)

Has a strand looking at IMS LD in the context of professional learning

www.prolearn-project.org

iClass (Integrated Project)

Has developed ASK-LDT, a graphical authoring tool for Learning Design.

http://www.iclass.info/



Prolix (Integrated Project)

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Integrated Project with 19 partners over 4 years

Implementing IMS LD for supporting business process changes.

Used to plan the learning activities needed when a change in a business process occurs.

www.prolix-project.eu



Calibrate: (IST STREP Project)

Brings together eight Ministries of Education, (including six MoEs from new member states), to carry out a multi-level project designed to support the collaborative use and exchange of learning resources in schools.

2.5 Years, run by European School Net

Providing tools for teachers based on IMS LD

calibrate.eun.org



TENCompetence works with IMS LD in the context of three critical areas:

• Life Long Learning

• Service based architecture

• Personal Learning Environment

There is a workpackage focusing specifically on Learning Activities, where IMS LD is central.

Developing authoring tools, and integrating SCORM into LD Runtime



Leonardo programme: OpenDock An IMS LD aware repository and demonstrator for VET. IMS LD Template Editor is an additional output.

OpenDocument.net repository: LAMP (Apache, MySQL, Perl). Installs on remote rented space.

CPs disaggregated and as searchable containers and contents

Module to parse XML, IMS LD in this version. API so that other systems can hook into it.

Demo at Open Market today



Instutional research, for example

Wollongong Centre for Interactive Learning Environments (Sue Bennett presentation)

Complutense University of Madrid <e-LD> (Open Market)

Waterloo LearningMapR

Individual research, for example

CoSMoS: (Open Market), NetUniversité, Collage…



Open Source foundations are making an important contribution.

.LRN is the first VLE to provide support for IMS LD, levels A, B & C. See their Demo at the Open Market

Moodle roadmap: mid 2007 “Support for importing/exporting LD, converting Moodle activities and sequences of activities into a standard format for sharing, and importing standard sequences into Moodle courses”



Open Source foundations are making an important contribution.

.LRN is the first VLE to provide support for IMS LD, levels A, B & C. See their Demo at the Open MarketMoodle roadmap: mid 2007 “Support for importing/exporting LD, converting Moodle activities and sequences of activities into a standard format for sharing, and importing standard sequences into Moodle courses”

LAMS Test V2

Still some things to discussIn particular service configuration

http://demo.lamscommunity.org/



Reload from CETIS at the University of Bolton

Originally a JISC funded project for the Content Packaging editor

Now a suite of IMS authoring tools, including IMS LD, standardised on the Eclipse platform

Reload used in Learning Design for Practitioners (LD4LP) at Liverpool Hope (at Open Market). Bid submitted to link with OpenDocument.net.

Demonstration at the Open Market today



TENCompetence and Reload

TENCompetence needs easier IMS LD authoring

Two approaches

Artificial intelligence: mapping any high level representation using a standard workflow representation to be mapped to IMS LD.

Creation of specific graphical interfaces.





It is hard to agree on component chunks

Depends on learners’ objectives, teacher preference, pedagogy, institutional context,

We need a range of options, so it is planned to develop palette of components generated automatically from partially completed UoLs



Tencompetence and LD runtime

Coppercore: runtime integration with SCORM currently underway

Development of spec to connect communication and collaboration services to LD runtime engines

TENCompetence provides an environment for planning and carrying out Life Long Learning

UoLs play in the TENCompetence client, but also represent and reproduce sequences of activities defined by the user in the client.



Current prospects for IMS LD (from UK perspective)

IMS LD is well known, but not well understood. Needs more outreach work

Not universally accepted as the solution to the challenges in IT support for pedagogic activities

At the same time it has not been rejected. Some would say it is a well intentioned skepticism.

Development work is continuing, but the momentum is not as strong as we would like.



What are people’s concerns about IMS LD?

It is seen as too complex to work with. This is (at least in part) a question of tooling.

Many teachers have control over their pedagogy, which constitutes their professional independence. They may mistrust the intrusion of any computer system into this domain.

Only convincing and useful applications will overcome this



Farmer & Tilton, June 2006, IM&M Technical Briefs

Part of OSS Watch work funded by JISC.



Three big challenges for IMS LD:

1. Disaggregation of VLEs

Stitching together services like mail, chat, blog, wiki etc is no longer hard, so VLEs are tending to be disaggregated

But IMS LD assumes VLEs, with cohorts, design time and runtime distinction…

Its role and use in a system which is built around the learner rather than the institution is an open question (PLE, TENCompetence)




2. Technological change

We tend to hear “We don’t need interoperability specs any more, we have Del.ico.us and Flickr…”

a) Zip files are anomalous in a Web 2.0 world. There are solutions, but there is an overhead.

b) XML based interoperability between large VLEs is starting to look like yesterday’s solution (whether this is right or wrong)




3. Institutional change

Education, especially higher education, is a moving target: expansion, new institutional structures and policies, Communities of Practice and Corporate Universities. All these meet in Life Long Learning

How can IMS LD meet the needs of this new environment? What additional specs and apps?

TENCompetence is focused on LLL, and will provide initial answers



Good news, bad news…

IMS LD has clear role in delivering interoperable flexible large scale distance education on VLEs

Providers still need to be convinced by applications and courses, but the logic of the solution is clear

However, there are many fewer VLEs than we might have expected, and so less need to interoperate…

But as well as interoperability, IMS LD is attractive as a modelling environment, and as a means of scheduling learning activities



Web 2.0 & PLE perspective: IMS LD is good at…

• Coordinating learning flows and (potentially) link with enterprise systems.

But this might be a service with no integrated course delivery

• Modelling pedagogic activities

But is the institutional baggage too much to carry?

We need to provide some smart applications, and/or profiles to show that this can work



TENCompetence Open Workshop

GMEX conference centre, Manchester

Thursday 11th - Friday 12th January

There is a call still open leading to publication in IJLT. Deadline 17th November (talk to me)

Come and discuss these issues!

www.tencompetence.org

Documents

IMS-LD, progress and prospects