This resource is based on a presentation by Gerry Green and postings in the Community between 19 - 30 July, 2004 titled “Interoperability – not just a big word!”
In this article Gerry talks about
- web resource format standards
- transferring e-resources easily between systems
- cataloguing with metadata for the technical and educational description of materials including digital rights and
- the automatic delivery of content and information between web sites
What does the term "interoperability" mean?
Interoperability is simply an umbrella term for making all the various facets of the electronic environment work together.
The old saying “when they’re good they’re VERY, VERY good, when they’re bad they’re horrid” applies so well to the world of computing.
One major reason for horrid behaviour is quite simply due to the lack of interoperability. When programs don’t work, when nothing plugs into anything, when things can’t be easily transferred, when stuff works in one environment but not another, when human intervention has to happen at steps along the way to make things work, then we have an uninteroperable environment.
One way we can get computers to be VERY, VERY good is to be aware of the concept of Interoperability. Technology should be almost transparent, not continually bugging us. Being Interoperable is essentially being conscious of using a standards based approach to the procurement of tools and the design, development and delivery of education and training in the e-environment.
Electronic resources must be readable by computers
Unlike paper resources which are are decoded by seeing, literate humans, electronic resources must be decoded by computers in order for humans to interact with them. If the computer is unable to decode any one of the files, humans are unable to access that resource.
Electronic learning resources can be made up of combinations of many different types of files - images, animations, sound, video, HTML pages, text documents and so on. Due to the evolutionary nature of the Web, different methods of encoding and compressing these files have evolved, so one type of resource can have several formats eg: an image can be a .jpg, .gif, .png, .bmp etc. The computer must have the appropriate decoding software in order to display that image. To further complicate things, some methods of encoding and the associated software are owned by commercial enterprises and so users are often unable to open files unless they have purchased the company’s software.
This was a problem before the Internet but since the widespread sharing and transfer of files that the Internet has enabled, the problem became major.
Enabling interoperability by standardising content file formats has become a solution and International Standards Organisations are playing a major role – particularly by ensuring that software development companies have access to internationally and industry agreed “open” standards.
These open standards are becoming widely used by software vendors and it is rare these days to purchase web development software that does not conform to the required standards. For most educational web developers, it is not necessary to understand these standards, just to be aware that any web or multimedia software you purchase should adhere to them.
These days teachers are often bombarded with promotional material for new software to make this or that part of their job “easier”. A golden rule should always be to check the interoperability aspect of this software. If software for e-learning does not adhere to accepted standards – then it will NEVER make your life easier!!
Visit the Interoperability Framework web site [http://flexiblelearning.net.au/interop/] and take a look at what the preferred content format web standards are.
How does Interoperability work?
Basically the way Interoperability works is by having software that adheres to the same “standards” so that all the components that make up an online course or event “talk” to each other.
… like the way electric plugs and sockets are standard – we simply cannot use electric appliances using a non-standard plug, they won’t plug in and connect to the electricity, unless we use an adaptor
... or ...
... like how our television and video sets in Australia are made to the PAL standard which means we can view TV transmitted in PAL, but not TV transmitted in the American NTSC standard
... so software that adheres to the same standards can work on a variety of computer types, networks and databases, or can at least plug into adaptor software that does the conversion for us.
Interoperability standards in the electricity and electronics areas have become so widely used that we take it almost for granted. Because these standards are not yet widely used in computing & networking, particularly in e-learning and because most of us have come to expect problems of interoperability when using computers and the Internet we seem to have trouble understanding that using this technology can become as easy as using electricity, televisions or videos.
Open standards
In the scenario above I was using actual events that I have experienced in my e-learning journey of the past six years. Certainly Open Source software is not necessarily non standards compliant, just as proprietary software is not necessarily standards compliant.
The Open Source debate is not one we want to get into in this forum – suffice to say that there are compelling business reasons why an organization would or would not want to go down the open source path. A quick search of Google will reveal a multitude of articles for and against Open Source.
What the Interoperability community is promoting is the use of OPEN STANDARDS by all software developers – whether that software is developed by an Open Source process or developed by commercial companies for profit.
The relevant Open Standards in the case of e-learning resources are the web development standards for the production of content as talked about in the previous thread AND the IMS and SCORM standards and specifications for describing and transferring content into and out of Learning Management Systems. I will be covering these topics in other threads of this discussion, and will cover your Thesis and Moodle questions as well.
How do you know your software is compliant?
A good question. For software developers there are SCORM compliance test tools available from the SCORM site http://www.adlnet.org. But for the rest of us mere mortals, we need to know to look for it in the software specifications or ask for it. We need to be aware that there are many aspects to compliance – and if it is important to us we need to school ourselves up on what to look for. Then we need to test it ourselves. This is why we have developed the Interoperability web site on this Australian Flexible Learning Framework site. http://flexiblelearning.net.au/interop. It provides all you need to know on this complex subject, and also has an email help desk to answer specific questions.
Transferring e-resources easily between systems
Many teachers start their experiences with e-teaching by experimenting with either free web tools, such as discussion groups, or interactions created in software such as Hot Potatoes, which they use in isolation online and integrate with other offline teaching strategies; or by using their organisation’s internal Learning Management System (LMS). Problems with interoperability are usually not experienced at this stage.
Interoperability problems surrounding the transfer of resources mostly occur at two stages.
The first is when items developed within one Learning Management System need to be transferred into another system, either because the resources are being sold or shared, or because the organisation buys a new system. Nearly always the problems are ones of database incompatibility. Any feature of the course resources which needs database interaction, such as tracking of student progress, discussion groups or quizzes will need to be specifically programmed or re-created into the new system if the database is incompatible. This can be time consuming and expensive.
If the Learning Management System is compliant with the IMS/SCORM Content Packaging Standard, then the process becomes a simple matter of clicking the export button in one system, transferring the resultant zip file and then clicking the import button in the new system. The Content Packaging standard packages the resources up, in the correct sequence and unpackages them at the other end. Many of the major LMS vendors are now working towards IMS/SCORM Content Packaging compliance, largely because the market place is maturing and beginning to demand this compliance.
The second is when interactions and multimedia are created that need to be imported into the LMS to interact with the database. For example, you may have created a quiz or puzzle or a crossword that you would like to be automatically marked, provide instant feedback to the student, and track the student’s participation and result. Unless the software has a SCORM export feature, it will be very difficult for non-database programmers to import the interactions into the database and have the interaction work correctly.
Many of the multimedia vendors, such as Macromedia Flash and Shockwave are now producing SCORM export features. The example Joyce gives of Microsoft Thesis is obviously an attempt by Microsoft to keep up with their competitors. Good to see!! For this software, it is simply a matter of choosing the SCORM export feature when the multimedia item is complete, then importing it into the Learning Management system using a SCORM import feature.
Increased awareness by developers and users of the advantages of standard compliance will result in more software developers producing standards compliance features in their products.
Metadata
Metadata is quite simply information about data. A library catalogue is metadata about the items held in the library, which enable us to identify and locate the item. The junk mail we receive in our letter boxes is metadata describing items on sale at local shopping centres etc.
In the context of learning resources housed in electronic databases, metadata either accompanies, or points to via a hyperlink, the resource in the database. Metadata describes the resource so that people looking in the database can discover the resource by entering keywords, subject descriptors, etc. into the database search feature. The search results are then usually displayed with a brief description of the resource, which enables the user to identify and then locate the resource.
Because of our experience with library and other databases over the years, we know that discovery of items in the database can be a “hit and miss” process, so we employ techniques which have been developed by librarians over time to improve discovery and identification.
The first technique is to use a commonly agreed metadata standard which sets out the required descriptive “elements” eg: title, keywords, date, author or producer, educational level, copyright information etc. If everyone uses the same format, then searching of the many databases available throughout the world becomes a simpler, more reliable process.
This is why educational institutions throughout the world are now putting effort into making sure their databases adhere to the accepted e-learning material metadata standard which is known as IEEE LOM. [http://flexiblelearning.net.au/interop/organisationguide.htm]
The second technique is to use “controlled vocabularies” in some of the descriptive elements of the metadata, so that everyone using the system – both those inputting the data, and those searching the data, are using the same words. This greatly enhances the success rate when searching a database.
Some producers of e-learning resources are worried about the cost of creating and maintaining metadata, but this in time can be offset by improved discovery by potential customers, resulting in improved sales. Costs are also being reduced by the increased automation of metadata creation.
Consider the following two scenarios for examples of how interoperability issues may affect a typical vocational education and training environment…
Interoperability Scenario 1 - Time Present
City Central TAFE Institute was a localised supplier of distance VET materials, experiencing an increased demand for online resources for Web delivery.
Wanting to cut costs, they quickly pulled together some web based resources in their existing multimedia software used for creating CD-ROMS. When they lifted the product to a web server, they found that the Web Browser could not display the product. The file format was not suitable for the Web.
Unable to get any funding, they downloaded free software to create web pages, images and animations, and managed to pull together some resources which displayed not too badly in Internet Explorer on a PC.
They managed to sell a few copies, but had many returned because the purchaser had a Macintosh computer running a different browser and could not see the resources on their computer.
They decided that video resources would be more popular – after all it was cheap and easy to film a live class then play it over the net – and teachers did not have to change their teaching styles. They managed to get funding this time and set up a large project filming live classes across the Institute.
Sales were not too bad, but then slowed. There were no repeat sales. Students complained that special plug in players were hard to download, video was of poor quality, took hours to download, and watching a “talking head” teacher without the opportunity to interact with the teacher and other students was boring. They switched off.
The funding hierarchy was not impressed.
City Central decided they could provide student interactivity if they purchased Learning Management System software. The staff didn’t think to look for a standards compliant system and found a free open source LMS to download that they thought would do the job.
With lucrative international markets in their sights, and to save face with the funding bodies, City Central embarked on a major content development push. Web and Multimedia developers were hired to produce state of the art educational content and interactions.
Having learnt from their mistakes, content format standards were adhered to and the web content worked fine
However, when the interactions were placed in the LMS, they would not work because the LMS software was not standards compliant. A database programmer had to be employed to get everything working.
This solved the problem but pushed the budget way over limit.
City Central now desperately needed to offer their product to as wide a market place as possible.
They put their catalogue into a web database, but they found that large numbers of visits to the site were not turning into sales. Feedback showed that people could not find what they were looking for because the resources had little description. City central then faced a huge retrospective “metadatering” project.
The funding authorities were by now loosing patience.
The whole foray into online resource development and delivery was declared a failure. Funding was stopped.
Teaching staff returned to face to face delivery, developers returned to print and audiovisual products.
The “early adopter” staff at City Central became frustrated and gradually filtered off to other jobs.
Thus …
It came to pass that a medium sized local market provider remained just that, did not open up new markets and faced a gradual reduction in demand for their distance training resources.
As more and more of their competition offered flexible, online blended modes of delivery, the demand for face to face courses diminished. No new teaching jobs were created and those who remained were expected to stretch themselves over more teaching areas with fewer and fewer students.
City Central was eventually closed and the inner city land sold for unit development.
Interoperability Scenario 2 - Time Future
City Central TAFE Institute was a localised supplier of distance print and audiovisual VET training materials, experiencing an increased demand for online resources for Web delivery.
From their experience with Video and CD they knew resources must be supplied in formats suitable for playing on commonly available equipment, so they were careful to design web materials to international web content format standards.
They were also aware of the increasing use of LMS software in training organisations, so made sure they designed materials suitable for “content packaging” between different compatible systems.
City Central had traditionally relied on printed catalogues to reach their clients, but realising the market power of the Web, decided to put their catalogue into a web database.
They then found out that their catalogue could be “fed” automatically as a web service into other sites, greatly expanding their market reach.
Overwhelmed by an increase in sales, City Central decided they could service customers more efficiently if they placed their products on the web for instant download after purchase, so web services enabling e-commerce transactions were established.
Larger clients then approached City Central to have a direct link between their databases so transactions could be automated. Because they had been careful to make sure their databases were designed to common standards, this was an easy process.
Because City Central had been careful to make resources to “content packaging” standards it was possible to load resources directly from City Central’s LMS direct into the client’s LMS.
BUT – sales were only a part of City Central’s market. They also shared and bartered resources with other VET organisations.
They found that providing copyright and rights management information, using established protocols, in their product descriptions, greatly enhanced the traffic in these products.
They were able to supplement their internal resources with those gained at little cost by bartering and sharing, and they felt secure knowing how they could use them without fear of litigation, or loss of revenue.
Thus …
It came to pass that a medium sized local market provider became a major international VET resource provider, opening up markets it could only have dreamed of a few years before and providing financial benefit to the Organisation and the community supporting it.
Oh … and ….
Teachers and students also benefited from the provision of quality resources, the flexibility of working and training in a manner that suited their work and lifestyle needs.
Convinced?
The AFLF Interoperability Project is about to release the draft Australian VET sector metadata application profile based on IEEE LOM, to be known as VETMAP, which includes recommended vocabularies to describe Australian VET resources using terminology relevant to the Australian VET sector. Stay tuned to the Interoperability web site http://flexiblelearning.net.au/interop/ for this important development.
