If the acronym COLIS puts you in mind of the sort of vegetable you refused to eat as a child, then you need to read this fascinating interview.  James Dalziel from the COLIS project talks to Tim Hand about "Collaborative Online Learning and Information Systems" (COLIS). 
 
Far from being an unpalatable vegetable, COLIS shows us the future of online learning and information systems.  It provides a demonstration environment of the concept of a learning object economy where learning objects are created, traded, acquired and used in a course delivered through to the student.
 
Many people have talked about these ideas in the elearning world but COLIS is the first demonstration environment that shows what can happen live using five different technologies working seamlessly using open standards.
 
Utopia?  Read on! (Or, if you're an aurally inclined type, listen to the attached audio file of the interview available on the right of the screen)

Tim:  James thanks for agreeing with the interview, we have heard a lot about the COLIS project lately. Can we get a brief description of what it is about?

James:  The COLIS project stands for “Collaborative Online Learning and Information Systems” It was a projects funded by DEST “Dept. of Education Science and Training”.  It was designed to try and imagine and develop a demonstration of what is the future of Online Learning and Information Systems, so it’s view was broader than simply just LMS or a particular elearning tool.  It included also things like library type systems, portals, directories - a broader view of where we are all going in the elearning area.

Tim:  And who was involved in the project?

James:  There are quite a lot of people involved, DEST and IMS Australia.  The local standards coordination group, were the sponsors of the project, there was then five universities – Macquarie University who led the project as well as USQ, Tasmania, UNE and Newcastle.  There were five elearning vendors – CA (Computer Associates) who provided some directories work, Web CT – the learning management system provider, IPR systems – digital rights management company, Fretwell Downing Informatics for the library search gateway/e-reserve, and the company that I have been involved in Web-MCQ which provided a learning object repository.  We also had a number of associates who provided us with metadata and learning objects including OTEN, and we also had some support from the CSIRO with our hosting and technical infrastructure.

Tim:  So why is COLIS provoking so much interest at the moment?

James:  COLIS actually shows a demonstration environment of something that many of us have talked about for a long time, the concept of a learning object economy where you could buy or sell learning objects or trade them.  This is sometimes called the learning object lifecycle - the process of learning objects being created, traded and acquired for use in a course delivered through to the student.  These are ideas we have talked about in the elearning world for quite some time but we have never really put together an end to end demonstration environment that shows what is happening live.  COLIS does that - it shows five different technologies working seamlessly together using open standards to demonstrate what’s possible in this area.

Tim:  So why was there a perceived need for a project like COLIS?

James: I think that many people felt that the use of standards was an important idea - the idea, that we have open standards to describe the ways in which you use learning objects and the way you move them around - but we hadn’t really created demonstration environments and standards was still a bit theoretical.  We all wanted them, people had maybe done some early work on metadata but we hadn’t really seen how the systems are glued together.  So COLIS was intentionally designed to demonstrate that and to help us imagine what that would be like by looking at a real environment.  One of things we found that by presenting COLIS both across Australia and internationally a lot of people who had some ideas about this (but never really been able to imagine the detail) by watching the environment live in action suddenly start to get a handle on “ok that is how you acquire a learning object”, - "so that’s how a license would apply to learning object",  "this is how I would prepare something for delivery into my learning management system",  "here’s how I might search across multiple repositories using some keywords”.  It’s seeing those things live in action that really makes a difference.

Tim:  COLIS could be accused of only being relevant to the higher education sector so what is the possible relevance to the VET sector?

James:  It’s a good question. COLIS was intentionally higher ed focus in the first instance  - that’s where the funding was focused - but many of the things that COLIS demonstrates shouldn’t be constrained only to higher education. Having learning object repositories, buying and selling learning objects (or a least being able to exchange them under digital rights) these are things that apply across many sectors including VET, schools and probably corporate training.  One of the things we have talked about in our road shows recently is that although the COLIS environment had a higher ed focus at the moment it would be very interesting to take a COLIS - like project into the VET sector or for that matter into the schools sector or corporate training and to see how you would recast parts of COLIS to still capture the particular needs of that sector, but building on some common infrastructure that we have already managed to demonstrate.

Tim:  You mentioned the international standards bodies, James, what’s been their reaction to the COLIS project?

James:  It’s been really interesting to watch their reaction because the standards bodies, people like IMS Global Learning consortium and also others like IEEE and so on have got a history of developing a lot of technical standards but not necessarily support for implementation or looking in detail on how it works in practice.  COLIS has taken not just one standard but a whole range of standards - IMS content packaging, IMS metadata, IMS digital repositories interoperability and also we use the Open Digital Rights Language specification.  So there are four standards in there that have been used to try and glue together the COLIS environment and that’s something that has not really been done before.  There are not really a lot of other projects that you can look at that provide a demonstration of so many systems glued together using open standards.  So when we first presented this at the IMS conference in September last year in the UK there was a lot interest in the fact the we had done something with the standards - that this is how it could really work - rather than, say, debating the specifics of the technical element of the standards.

Tim:  So James at this point in April 2003 anyway, what do you think have been the main outcomes of the demonstrated project?

James:  One of the best things it has done is it has helped a lot of people to start to imagine in real terms how this is going to work.  We have had the idea of a learning object economy, learning object life cycle and so on for a while, but we haven’t actually seen how it might run live.  COLIS shows you that and a lot of people when they see our road shows or presentations come away saying things like ‘now I can start imagine how it might work’ and you might come away and say "well I would do it differently - I would have this bit or I wouldn’t have that bit or add this function".  That’s no problem at all in the sense it has provided a reference point for which people can start to think about how this is going to work.

Tim:  So now you are off the road, unpacked your bags presumably, where to from here for COLIS or James Dalziel?

James:  For COLIS we have finished a set of national road shows and will probably continue to provide presentations from time to time both Australia and internationally where people want to learn more about the project.  But what we are doing now is a new project that is being supported by DEST to take the COLIS environment and investigate two things.  The first one is substitut ability of the vendor systems using open standards - because we glued together the systems using these open standards in theory we should be able to get vendors for any other of the components.  As long as they comply with the same standards you could pull out one system and plug in a different one.  So that’s a project we have running for the second half of this year and will be really interesting to see how that pans out and just how practical that is as an idea.  It’s great in theory but we need to learn how it works in practice. 

The other project the we are supporting is some education research projects where people actually use the COLIS environment or use the concepts of that environment to work with teachers, librarians and potentially students to start to unpack issues like "well if you had this new environment - you could actually really use this - what would be the issues, what are the good things, what do people like, what do they want more of, what are the problems, what are the challenges, what are the missing components?"  So those two projects are the key things that we are doing in 2003 and we will be doing that essentially between now and the end of the year and releasing findings once that is completed at the end of this year, and who knows what's for COLIS beyond that.  We sometime joke that COLIS is a bit of a way of life, not just a single project, and it seems to imply a lot of things about the future.  So COLIS is a concept or a way of life that might go on for a long time, even though that the particular COLIS project that got us started finished at the end of 2002.

Tim:  James the substitut ability aspects has caused a lot of interest in your road shows, why is it so important?

James:  I think that there is this concern that if we lock ourselves to anyone particular vendor's product that we might be stuck with that in the long term, and in the future when we wanted to change products  - it doesn’t matter really which one - that we may be stuck to the point where it would be so costly or so difficult to break the integration around that product - and also all the professional development - that you would just be stuck to it.  The promise of the standards area is that if systems are standards compliant then you should be able to pull out one of them and plug in another one that runs according to the same standards and that should be a relatively easy process.  So COLIS is saying by promising to prove the substitut ability we are taking the first steps in saying that you can have an environment that has got many different systems in it but you are not locked into any one of them - provided they are based on open standards.  In theory you could pull out one of the systems and replace it with another that uses the same open standards.

Tim:  James thanks for all of that and I guess it is time for you to get back to all your emails.