SIFA and ADL Partner

Interoperable Learning Content Vision
Consider all of the educational content that society has developed. Courses on world religions, lesson plans for high school geometry, corporate training materials on risk management, military training programs on surface to air missile operations. An immense body of educational content is "out there." Yet what untold and countless number of hours are spent every day recreating educational content that already exists?
The vision of interopable learning content is to provide both visibility and accessibility to the widest possible body of digital instructional materials. Interopable learning content technologies allow teachers to systematically find, obtain,license (if necessary), customize, and incorporate relevant materials into instruction. Fulfilling this vision is one of the missions of the SIFA-ADL partnership.
SIFA Partners with ADL on Interoperable Learning Content
The SIF Association is holding regional meetings in the United States to discuss some of the details of its partnership with ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning; http://www.adlnet.gov). The focus of the partnership between the two organizations is on interoperable learning content. I attended the meeting hosted by Chicago Public Schools on November 8, 2007. Organizations that had a presence at the meeting included Chicago Public Schools, Pearson, Follett, Integrity Technology Solutions, Educational Systemics and Plato Learning. Jill Abbott, SIFA's Learning Strategist, and Paul Jesukiewicz, ADL's Deputy Director, lead the meeting. This article is a brief summary of what was presented at the meeting.
About ADL
ADL is an initiative sponsored by the US Department of Defense. The original concept behind ADL was to create a standard to facilitate the sharing of learning content for the US government. The result of this work has since moved into the mainstream and been adopted by higher education, industry, and international concerns.
ADL's Work Product: SCORM
SCORM is the standard, or reference model, defined by ADL that specifies how learning objects may be packaged and exchanged. The scope of an individual learning object may range from all of the content needed for a semester long course, down to a single course exercise. A SCORM shareable content object consists of two parts: a manifest and instructional content payload.
The manifest contains metadata about the instructional content payload that tags the content and describes its organization. The manifest can also indicate sequence and branching among members of the content payload. For example, based on the results of a student's formative assessment, a learning management system could potentially select a different sequence through the content. The sequencing component of the manifest facilitates dynamic adaptation to an individual student's needs.
Learning management systems are the primary consumers of shareable content objects. SCORM compliant content can come from a variety of sources ranging from content publishers to individual teachers. Various tools exist to enable the development of shareable content objects. The authoring subsystems of learning management systems can generally export shareable content objects. Standalone tools exist that allow authors to package content developed in other formats (e.g. office products, HTML) into shareable content objects.
Direction of ADL/SCORM
One of ADL's stated objectives is to divest itself of the stewardship and future development of SCORM. A new body called LETSI (Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability) will take this over. LETSI will be an international, lightweight organization that will govern SCORM development going forward. LETSI will build on the current version of SCORM to develop a common framework, known as Core SCORM, that will be extensible to meet the needs of diverse industries and groups. Core SCORM will define the fundamentals of shareable content objects, most likely including packaging, basic metadata, and sequencing.
Status of the Partnership
The SIFA-ADL partnership has been established, but the work of integrating SIF and SCORM is in its formative stages. The two organizations are soliciting use cases from vendors and end users, with an emphasis on how schools want to use the technology. This communities of practice pattern will be intrinsic to the LETSI/Core SCORM development process. Like SIFA and its contingent of school-affiliated organizations, other organizations, industries and groups will build on Core SCORM to meet community-specific use cases.
SIF and Educational Content
SIF is traditionally known as a way to model and move administrative and demographic data among operational information systems in schools. Those involved closely with SIF (including myself) are convinced of its overall, positive impact on school operations and data, including data quality and availability. With a widely implemented transport infrastructure and data model, SIFA is building capacity that will more directly impact teaching and learning within schools. The alliance with ADL will result in the eventual integration of Core SCORM and SIF, which will advance SIFA's teaching and learning initiatives and further establish SCORM as a global platform for interoperable learning content.
Impact on Online Learning and Personalized Learning
Although compelling from the standpoint of sharing and efficiency, the vision stated at the outset of this article does not give full justice to the potential of interoperable learning content. Online learning and personalized learning are two major beneficiaries of interoperable learning content.
Online learning continues to proliferate. Students are clearly expressing the preference to learn via the technology that is already intrinsic to their lives. In addition to becoming the learning method of choice for students, virtual schools fill critical gaps in traditional educational systems. Virtual schools can help students maximize their potential by serving as an alternative form of instruction. Interoperable learning content has the potential to remove the burden of content development from virtual schools by providing access to a world-wide network of instructional material.
Personalized learning takes the benefits of online learning to a new level. By implementing a continuous feedback loop between teaching and learning, custom "virtual" curricula can be developed to dynamically address the needs every student as an individual. Each student can learn to her or his maximum potential.