Interoperability Standards for eLearning in Government initiatives - the Norwegian case

Project Coordinator Tore Hoel,the eStandard project ofNorwaywww.estandard.no

Life and learning up in the cold north The world’s best

countries to live in: Denmark Sweden Norway Finland .. .. .. Italy

(Source: UN survey,Uni of Pennsylvania)

Educational levelbeing one of the salient factors contributing to the high ranking of the Nordic countries

Schools are soon ready for e-learning

Well equipped – especially secondary level

Last 3 years: 40 € spent on every child 0 – 18 years of age to stimulate ICT in education

Broadband access to Internet from home

Da Fi Se UK No

Internet-computers per 100 students

Ubiquity of LMS in Norwegian learning

All universities are now rolling out LMS to all their students

Schools are following up – the municipalities are signing contracts with the Norwegian LMS vendors

Two major Norwegian vendors sharing the market

Are we ready for standardization?

Standardization of e-learning technology is a complex negotiation of meaning and interests within large actor-networks of strong individual intellectuals, companies, users and user organizations, software vendors, international bodies, system architectures, message definitions, individual data elements and specifications - comprising both human and nonhuman actors.

Stakeholders in standardization

Governmental authorities Educational communities Vendors Publishing houses Content developers Individuals

All have different agendas and strategies for learning and teaching

Authorities

Mediating negotiation

Vendors

TeachersUniversitiesSchoolsLearners

Contentproviders

We need a body that is neutral, respected by everyone, and able to facilitate the negotiations between the stakeholders

The eStandard project of Norway

Awareness raising - not research Part of National Learning Network

initiative (covering lifelong learning, e.g. all education)

Convey international best practice Participate in international

standardization bodies Give advice to Norwegian projects

The need for a metadata profile

Utdanning.no – a learning & teaching metaportal to learning resources, opened this year

Norwegian Schoolnet – use metadata (Dublin Core), but no strategy for distribution of metadata

LMS vendors – prepared for LOM, but nobody are tagging their resources

Publishing houses – waiting for digital rights technology

Nor-LOM Core

IEEE LOM – the solution to metadata? We need a way to assign static

metadata now, i.e. LOM LOM has no value without a national

profile A small or a large LOM Core? Vocabularies are the challenge What about identifiers?

Nor-LOM Core ver. 0.42 by Dec. 15th

Open discussion – a challenge to the “governmental logic” “Too fast for us” “Who are making the decisions?”

Aschehoug publishing house contributed their metadata scheme

The vendors will take our advice The L&T-portal will set the standard for

exchange format for learning resources

Codebash – vendors testing interoperability

Two major vendors participated in CETIS’ CodeBash in June

Norwegian event in October

Standards do have practical implications when technology don’t function!

On the agenda

Specification for Course Description Metadata (first draft Oct. 2003)

Learning Object Repositories One or many repositories Metadata repositories

Federated Access and Identity Management LOM and TopicMaps Digital rights management – licence schemes,

e.g. Creative Commons

Denmark

Recommendation for standards and national exchange platform due December 2003

More closed process owned by the Ministry, run by a consultancy firm with representatives from education, publishing, vendors, libraries etc.

Danish LOM profile Focus on Digital Rights Management as

part of the profile

Sweden

Plans for “soft infrastructure” recommendations No work on profiles yet The Ministry of Education and their bodies are

putting out brochures which deal with standardization of e-learning in general - to make some sense of the eStandard alphabet soup

E-learning standards seems to be like SCORM (which is not the case! SCORM is one profile – among others…)