Metadata and Services at the 2008 SIFA Annual Meeting

This year's SIFA Annual Meeting was held in Washington, D.C. Each day's agenda included both specification development work and end-user content. This forum is typical for SIF meetings; it provides great opportunities for end-users and developers to collaborate. The topics of metadata and services occupied quite a bit of my time during the meetings.
The primary focus of the Data Model Task Force meeting on day one was to make progress on the work that we are doing with pattern development for the Data Model. The general thought process is to develop and apply a pattern language for SIF data objects to increase the quality of the specification as it continues to grow and change. Patterns will hopefully arm our data experts with validated techniques for modeling and moving data. As the meeting actually unfolded, we were not able to spend a lot of time on patterns. The agenda item prior to patterns was metadata, and it actually occupied the majority of the meeting time.
Metadata in SIF tends to confuse most people. Metadata in SIF currently takes the form of learning-content-centric elements, plus a very general-purpose time element, that can be applied to any data object. The specification is loose about how to use metadata; it indicates that a specific contract must exist between suppliers and consumers of metadata. Metadata is always optional, and has no impact on operational systems; they simply ignore it if they don't want to use it. Metadata will increase in importance to SIF as more and more teaching and learning vendors use SIF. SIFA's intention is not to create a new specification for metadata but, rather, to leverage what is already out there. Elements of LOM have already been incorporated into SIF. Metadata will continue to evolve; new elements have been proposed for the 2.2 release. I think a good step in eliminating confusion and making metadata more useful will be to develop formal ways to define metadata contracts. Services will also likely have an impact on how we use metadata in SIF.
"Services" is a hot topic within SIFA. We have tried to take the time to clarify what we mean by services, and I have a previous blog post on what "SIF Services" are, and are not. It is most productive if you can wrap your mind around the fact that, today, SIF is primarily a message-based interoperability specification. Understanding message-based interoperability is really important. It is a recognized and valid approach to systems integration that falls in the general category of Enterprise Application Integration solutions. The current architecture of SIF as defined in the SIF Implementation Specification consists of a Zone Integration Server (ZIS) and Agents.
The ZIS is the message bus. Its main functions include guaranteed delivery of messages (queuing), providing a channel for transport, and providing access control to data. Agents are message gateways that sit between applications and the ZIS. Agents' main functions include moving messages to and from the message queue over SIF transport (which requires an understanding of Infrastructure) and translating between the SIF Data Model and the application's native data model. Many of the components of the SIF Infrastructure do not have mature, equivalent standards in the Web Services (note the intential caps) world. However, those standards are evolving and may, one day, provide an alternative to the SIF Infrastructure or, perhaps, replace it altogether. For various reasons, this will not happen over night. Today I believe that it is most advantageous to place "services" into two buckets: 1) intra-zone services, which will be based on the current Infrastructure, and 2) extra-zone services, which will be based on existing W3C standards.

Context of services in SIF

Intra-zone services are proposed for the 2.3 development cycle. The proposal, which seems to be well thought out, adds new message types to the SIF Infrastructure to allow for service invocation, response, and eventing. It is a good evolutionary step for SIF that allows us to solve problems using our current and widely deployed technology base. Adding support for intra-zone services to existing agents should be a relatively low level of effort.
I frame extra-zone services as SIFA sanctioned methods to get data (and functionality) into and out of a Zone. Extra-zone services would likely be built on SOAP and other standards (RSS, REST, JSON were also suggested "protocols"). Leading members of the association are working together to determine the best ways to explore the design and construction of extra-zone services.
Over time, we will hopefully end up with a unified services architecture. For now I think exploring intra-zone and extra-zone services as separate solutions to distinct problems is the best approach.

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.

What's New in SIF 2?

The SIF 2 Implementation Specification has been available for about a year. Quite honestly, general adoption of SIF 2 has lagged in the market due to various reasons that I won't go into at this time. SIF 1.5r1 is still the most widely implemented version of the specification. It's worth noting that SIF 2 offers some compelling new capabilities. Following is a summary of some of the new capabilities in SIF 2 (this information comes from the specification and from my own experience):

• Increased use of other standards, including XML schema and namespaces
  
• Addition of SIF_Extended query to support more dynamic query and reporting
  
• Many new data objects across the specification
  
• Student Record Exchange objects provide new capabilities for data exchange between K12 and higher education, and for many other applications
• Significant enhancements to assessment objects
• Various infrastructure improvements to provide for "smarter" agents
• Implementation of contexts as a way to sub-divide zones
• Implementation of metadata; this will become increasingly more important as SIF gains momentum in teaching and learning technologies
  
• For developers with existing "responder" agents it is also important to note that SIF 2 now requires that you support querying by all mandatory elements, not just the root elements
  

Should you wait for SIF 2?
Emphatically: NO! You should not wait for wider adoption of SIF 2 prior to implementing.
If you are a school looking to implement then it's likely that most of your applications support 1.5r1 today, and that the vendor companies should have a roadmap to SIF 2. Going forward today will allow you to get the benefits that SIF offers, and it will allow you to gain experience that you can apply to SIF 2 implementations when the time is right. Just make sure that your ZIS will support SIF 2!
If you are a software vendor looking to implement a SIF agent the answer on waiting is also "no, don't wait." However, you should plan on implementing support for both 1.5r1 and 2 within your agent. Depending on how you implement the Agent, the level of effort to do "double duty" is definitely not double; however, it's also not necessarily trivial.
Another item of note is that SIFA is striving to release specifications more rapidly to better accommodate end user needs. As of the time of this post, SIF 2.1 is the current release, 2.2 is in review, and work is being done on SIF 2.3+. Rest assured that the development process that SIFA follows ensures backward compatibility within the 2.x series.
Please make sure to visit the specification site if you are interested in all of the details.