The backbone of almost every article published in Educational Pathways is built around in-depth telephone interviews with key administrators, faculty and staff who work directly inside the field of online teaching and learning in higher education. In similar fashion, a long talk with Rob Abel, the new executive director of IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS/GLC), brought more important online learning and teaching issues to light for publication here.

Abel is a former senior executive for Collegis (now a unit of SunGard Higher Education Solutions). He replaced Ed Walker, who retired after six years as CEO of IMS/GLC.

Global E-learning Community

IMS/GLC was launched from within EDUCAUSE eight years ago. It has grown into a high technology-oriented, non-profit support organization that is currently comprised of 50 members and affiliates from a wide variety of sectors within the global e-learning community, including hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, publishers, government agencies, systems integrators, multimedia content providers, and other consortia.

Developing and Promoting Open Specifications and Standards
 
The IMS/GLC mission has always revolved around developing and promoting the adoption of open technical specifications and standards that would enable educational technologies to interoperate with each other. Interoperability, according to Wikipedia, is “the ability of systems, units, or forces to provide services to and accept services from other systems, units or forces and to use the services so exchanged to enable them to operate effectively together.” As noted on its website, IMS/GLC “provides a neutral forum in which members with competing business interests and different decision-making criteria collaborate to satisfy real-world requirements for interoperability and re-use.” Hence, contributing members include competing CMS providers, such as Blackboard, Angel, and

Desire2Learn, and competing publishers, such as Thomson, Pearson, and McGraw Hill, all listed as working together under the IMS/GLC umbrella. Over the years, IMS/GLC has developed 16 foundational specifications, ranging from specifications on accessibility and digital repositories, to e-portfolios, enterprise services, meta-data, and more.

It is also important to note that another IMS/GLC contributing member is the Department of Defense Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative. As explained on its website, “ADL employs a structured, adaptive, collaborative effort between the public and private sectors to develop the standards, tools and learning content for the learning environment of the future.”

Transitioning from a Technology Support Group to an Industry Advocate

“IMS has been traditionally very much a technical group,” says Abel. “The people sitting around the table were technologists who were trying to figure out how to make products work together.” In short, IMS is a pretty “high-techy” group. However, Abel is working at transitioning IMS/GLC from a technology support organization to a powerful industry advocate for the global teaching and learning community. His basic strategy revolves around pulling together all those IMS/GLC high-tech resources to identify key industry challenges and best practices that are relevant to the teaching and learning industry. He also wants to focus on bringing in a new base of end-user members who are the folks grabbling with all the educational technologies that are out there today. For instance, the University of Maryland University College and the UK’s Open University are relatively new IMS/GLC contributing members, holding ground with the likes of Cisco Systems, the Educational Testing Service, Microsoft, IBM, the UK’s Joint
Information Systems Committee, and others.

Keeping Pace with the Impact of Technology in Education

So, what does all this mean to online learning providers?

For one, it means paying attention to, or joining, IMS/GLC (see “IMS/GLC Learning Industry Leaders Forum for End-Users” ) might keep you abreast of where online teaching and learning is heading and what educational technologies and enterprise support products and services are really on the leading edge. According to Abel, in its new role as an advocacy group, IMS/GLC is expected to encourage the growth and impact of learning technology worldwide by developing more interoperability specifications and standards, promoting learning technology innovation, developing best practices for adoption of learning technologies, and evaluating the impact on learning and the learning community.

Basically there are six IMS/GLC initiatives currently taking shape to help meet these high expectations:

1. Common Cartridge for Digital Course Content

Publishers and CMS providers are working together to develop a common reusable format for digital content. Started about one year ago, this initiative also applies to institutions that create their own digital content. Abel says that demonstrations of work accomplished thus far (prototypes) in this area will be presented at the upcoming IMS/GLC conference next month. He adds that “within the next 12 months, we may be seeing some products in the marketplace” that comply with the Common Cartridge for Digital
Course Content specifications and standards currently under development.

2. Interoperability Among Open Source and Commercial Applications

Abel explains that educators and technologist are very interested in open source initiatives such as SAKAI, Moodle and uPortal, “but if you look at actual adoption at this point, it is very limited. You are talking about 15 to 20 percent of institutions that are serious about implementing open source applications. But if you look at their three-year expectations, pretty much across the board they are expecting a lot more activity from open source.” IMS/GLC will watch for any possible integration points between open source technologies and commercial vendors, Abel says, adding that “interestingly enough commercial vendors are very interested in helping to figure this out. They are by no means saying that they are against open source. I think we all see it as an investment being made across the board. It can be useful whether it is on the open source side or the commercial side. The question is how can they interoperate? We are going to be doing more research on this with institutions over the next six to eight months.”

3. Rich Media Learning Applications
 
A new category of products related to capturing classroom activities in audio and video for publishing to portable/mobile devices - primarily iPods - has exploded onto the teaching and learning scene. A new IMS/GLC group is taking a close look at this relatively young development and asking if this is a fad or a real advance? In the IMS/GLC April 2006 newsletter, for instance, it is noted that “it seems that every student wants an iPod. Some institutions are conducting experiments in the use of iPods for learning. But, do we really expect these high-profile efforts to bear any fruit in new or pervasive ways to enhance learning?”

4. Plug and Play Interface Between Learning Applications and Digital Repositories

As digital repositories grow and expand through such online collections of scholarly material as MERLOT, Connexions, and MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW), can there be one interface that can be put inside any course management system to easily access x number of repositories? Abel says that there were “heavy demonstrations” at last year’s IMS/GLC conference around what is referred to as “federated searching,” meaning technology that can search through multiple databases and provide relevant results. “This year we have a follow up activity (at the upcoming June conference) to figure out how to productize this,” Abel says, adding that “it is hard to say when this might actually happen.”

5. Enterprise Learning Industry Reference Implementation

This is a long way of saying “frameworks for learning,” says Abel, and it really gets to the heart of what IMS/GLC has been all about. This takes into account student information systems (SIS), learning systems, library services and financial systems. The goal is to establish a “framework” for how all these different types of systems and services can communicate with each other and interoperate within an overall institutional enterprise. Abel explains how since the start of IMS/GLC eight years ago there has been a rapid evolution of new categories popping up - i.e., e-portfolios, assessment systems, digital repositories, etc. - that need to be included inside this new hypothetical framework. “From an end-user’s perspective, what is the vision of what my learning platform will look like in the future?” asks Abel. “Will I just buy Blackboard (for example), which will give me everything, or do I have a best-in-breed strategy where I can pick and chose” from within a whole frameworks-for-learning domain. “The Enterprise Learning Industry Reference Implementation is all about how do we continue with this work,” says Abel. “It is very high end. This is where we have all the technical architects from different companies putting their heads together and asking okay, how do we make this happen?’ I think just being in tune with this, understanding where this initiative is going, can be useful to mid-tier and other institutions.”

6. Talent Management

The sub title for this initiative is “Integration of Corporate HR Functions with Learning and Higher Education,” and it is being led by Robert Todd, Director of Product Strategy for Convergys Learning Services (formerly DigitalThink). Abel says Todd is a strong believer in employee retention being tightly correlated with the learning experiences that employers can provide over a lifetime. “We are talking about competency models and learner profiles. And through our strong connection with higher education, IMS can hopefully translate that into opportunities” for corporations and higher education institutions to work toward common goals, Abel explains. Furthermore, the Talent Management initiative is “an approach to managing corporate investments in people - that integrates previously disconnected human resource processes, such as learning, recruiting, performance management, and compensation, to improve company performance.”

Adding to the aforementioned six initiatives, Abel confirms that IMS/GLC has a much stronger global emphasis today than it did eight years ago. “Education, if anything, is becoming more global. We’re interested in expanding globally to address standards overall in terms of quality of education and where the future of education should he heading, in general. It has become much more of an executive conversation and leadership conversation that is complementing the technical conversation. What is the use of doing all this great technical work, if you are working on the wrong problems? You need to understand what difficulties the industry is having and what challenges we are all trying to solve.”

http://www.imsglobal.org/