DISCUSSION AND CURRENT ISSUES

Understandably, SCORM and LOM receive most of the attention and scrutiny of the standards discussed, and they have provided the basis of a significant number of initiatives and projects worldwide, some with very substantial backing and budgets. However, while there can be no doubt that they have promoted and enabled interoperability, flexibility and reusability in the development of learning environments, there still are a number of issues of debate concerning them.

One area that has been the subject of much debate is the nature of the LO itself. This is significant, as the LO is very much the basis upon which virtually all of the learning technology standards and specifications discussed here have been built upon. Commentators such as Frierson (2003), Wiley (2001) and Rehak and Mason (2003) have highlighted that there still appears to be concern over just exactly what a LO is. “Different definitions abound, different uses are envisaged, and different sectors have particular reasons for pursuing their development. In this environment of uncertainty and disagreement, the various stakeholders are going off in all directions” (Rehak & Mason, 2003). Certainly this seems to be confirmed by the existence of competing LOM specifications; for example, IEEE, IMS, CanCore and SingCore, where the latter three have extended the base IEEE specification to include proprietary extensions to the LOM metadata and thus introduced a degree of incompatibility back into a specification that was supposed to enable interoperability and compatibility. This has proved in the past and is likely to continue to in the future, a significant barrier to interoperability and reuse of learning content.

Anido-Rifon (2001) notes also that the current LOM specifications’ lack of internal descriptions of LOs is a problem. It can hinder interoperability in a number of ways; for example, if information needs to be adapted or utilised for other processes. This is significant if developers try to enable user-specifiable preferences as required for adaptive learning environments. We may also see, as a result of this, that further extensions to the LOM specifications may be developed or bridges to other metadata standards such as MPEG7 are created, to enable the inclusion of the types of content that cannot be defined under the current LOM specifications into learning environments.

However, the most significant debate concerning learning technology standards and one which is applicable to all of the standards we have discussed so far, is what Wiley (2001) describes as the “decontextualisation” of learning that results as a consequence of using the learning technology standards approach to developing educational tools. Commentators such as Wiley (2001), Freisen (2003) and Rehak (2003) argue that the pedagogical-neutral model upon which all of the technologies are based removes all aspects of instructional context from the learning process, and that this is something that is at odds with modern educational theory. Wiley notes, “while economically sensible, the drive towards decontextualisation may actually be counter productive from the standpoint of student learning” (Wiley, 2001). A sentiment backed up by Rehak, who, commenting on SCORM in particular, states that it is based on “a limited pedagogical model unsuitable for some environments” (Rehak, 2003).

One standard that is the subject of particular criticism is Simple Sequencing. Simple Sequencing is based on what is described as “a single user interaction model of behaviour” (Rehak, 2003), which according to Rehak, “does not easily accommodate multiple user environments, especially those requiring different courses of action for different users” (Rehak, 2003). The IMS Learner Design specification is intended to be an improvement on Simple Sequencing and was specifically designed to enable the ability to implement some aspects of pedagogy into learning environments. However, although Learning Design is a significant advance in functionality over Simple Sequencing, there still are concerns over the Learning Design concept and its implementation. Some question the actual reusability of Learning Design specifications. Downes (2003) goes as far as to comment that, “Learning design and reusability are incompatible.” Basically, his argument is that learning design specifications need to be so tailored to individual environments or contexts that, as a result, they are unable to be of general applicability.

So what hope, then, is there for educational technology standards? The future may lie in the semantic web. It was noted earlier how LOM and its XML and RDF representations sit at layers 2 and 3 of Berners-Lee’s semantic web stack (see Figure 2). Many of the standards outlined above aim to provide semantic information to learning content, interpret the semantic information of the learning content to enable the e-learning process or provide structure to the semantic information, yet none of the standards could be considered to sit at any of the layers above 3. This is possibly because almost all are based on the XML representation of LOM. However, as yet, little work has been done on educational ontologies or vocabularies, the type of specifications that would sit at layer 4 of the semantic web stack and would be based on the RDF representations of LOM and so interpret meaning of content. Once we have these in place, it gives the ability to develop domain models, user models and possibly most significantly pedagogical models, giving the option of providing context and the ability to implement pedagogy to learning environments based on standards (see O’Dea, Huang & Mille, 2003) and even fully adaptive learning environments.