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IMS Common Cartridge - Overview
Terms of use
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Terms of use
These contents have been obtained from the IMS web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the IMS web site for additional information on terms of use.
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IMS Global Learning Consortium
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Common Cartridge is the first of three major standards that comprise a new generation of Digital Learning Services standards to support a new generation of learning technology. These are:
- Organized and distributed digital learning content (Common Cartridge - CC)
- Applications, systems, and mash-ups (Learning Tools Interoperability - LTI)
- Learner information: privileges and outcomes (Learning Information Services – LIS)
The Common Cartridge defines an open format for the distribution of rich, web-based content. It is designed to ensure the correct installation and operation of content across any Common Cartridge conformant platforms and tools. |
Scope
SCORM was developed to support portability of self-paced computer-based training content. This is a very different set of needs than those of digital course materials that are used to support an online course where there is a cohort of students and an instructor, teacher, or professor.
Common Cartridge was developed primarily to support the use of digital course materials and digital books in the instructional context. It was not designed as a replacement for SCORM. Educational scenarios require advances in assessment, interactive content, sequencing of content, collaboration, facilitation, and authorization that SCORM was not designed to address, but Common Cartridge was.
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Purpose
Common Cartridge solves two problems:- The first is to provide a standard way to represent digital course materials for use in online learning systems so that such content can be developed in one format and used across a wide variety of learning systems (often referred to as course management systems, learning management systems, virtual learning environments, or instructional management systems).
- The second is to enable new publishing models for online course materials and digital books that are modular, web-distributed, interactive, and customizable.
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Common Cartridge Benefits
- Greater choice of content: Enables collections of learning resources of various types and sources.
- Reduces vendor/platform lock-in: Establishes course cartridge native formats endorsed by educational publishers, and supports a wide variety of established content formats, eliminating platform lock-in.
- Greater assessment options: Explicitly supports the most widely used standards for exchanging and tracking assessment items (IMS QTI) providing a standard scoring and tracking alternative that does not require the complexity or overhead of a CBT-like runtime interaction.
- Increases flexibility, sharing and reuse: Fits within the educational context of enabling instructors to assemble lesson plans of various resources and publish those as reusable and changeable packages that are easy to create, share, and improve.
- Supports flexible packaging via URL references to web content: Based on an application profile of IMS Content Packaging v1.2, Common Cartridge manifests support "virtual content" organizations through URL references, thus reducing the size of cartridges while increasing flexibility.
- Supports collaboration and web 2.0 mash-ups (via future provisioning of IMS LTI): Includes exchange standard for online discussion forums and has been designed to allow future incorporation of IMS Learning Tools Interoperability to enable web service launch and data exchange of distributing learning applications and systems from within Common Cartridges.
- Supports content authorization via protected resources: Cartridges or portions of cartridges can be protected through a standard open authorization protocol.
- Allows straightforward migration from SCORM 2004: Common Cartridge and SCORM 2004 are both based on IMS Content Packaging allowing use of tools to convert from SCORM to the advantages of Common Cartridge.
- Backed by a vibrant community providing tools for implementation and conformance: The Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability Alliance provides open source and community source tools for automated conformance testing of cartridges, testing of learning platforms, a reference implementation of the authorization service, future incorporation of LTI, and much more.
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Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability Alliance
The Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability Alliance has been created as a high value community for those involved in implementing Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) through a primarily online engagement with experts from the IMS member organizations, IMS staff, and a large variety of resources shared by the participants. End-user organizations are also heavily involved in the Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability Alliance because IMS staff facilitate collaborative projects among institutions, school districts, and suppliers that are looking to scale the effective use of digital resources and applications.IMS Common Cartridge Web Site |
Terms of use
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These contents have been obtained from the IMS web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the IMS web site for additional information on terms of use.
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Common Cartridge specifies seven things:- A format for exchange of content between systems so that there is a common way to interpret what the digital learning content is and how it is organized (IMS Common Cartridge). The content is described in a manifest and the components that make up the manifest may be in the exchanged package or external to the package (referenced by URL).
- A standard for the metadata describing the content in the cartridge (IMS Learning Object Metadata) - Common Cartridge is extensible to allow other metadata schemas.
- A standard for test items, tests, and assessments (IMS Question and Test Interoperability). This standard allows learning systems to understand imported assessments as natively - so they can be manipulated (such as deciding what items are to be used and where in the flow of a course) as needed in the learning system. Common Cartridge includes a question bank (i.e., a QTI objectbank), offering instructors additional questions to those contained within the pre-configured assessments, which they can configure around the core material.
- A standard for launching and exchanging data with external applications so that they can be part of a single learning experience orchestrated through the learning system (IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability). These can be literally any type of application in any location, such as social networking, wiki, external assessment systems, adaptive tutors, varieties of web-based content libraries, or other learning systems.
- A schema for populating online discussion forums for collaboration among students. This allows such forums to be pre-populated with potential exercises, discussion threads, and so forth.
- A schema for populating web links. This allows learning platforms to be pre-populated with links to relevant external resources.
- An authorization standard (access rules) for each component of the package (IMS Authorization Web Service). This allows "protected" content or applications (those requiring a license) to be contained in a cartridge in a flexible way along with unprotected content.
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Terms of use
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These contents have been obtained from the IMS web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the IMS web site for additional information on terms of use.
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General Information
Title: “IMS Common Cartridge Profile: Overview”
Version: 1.1
Release Date: 10 January 2011
Officially Released: 24 February 2011
Status: Final
Editor: Jeff Kahn
Electronic Version: IMS Common Cartridge v1.1 Overview
Title: “IMS Common Cartridge Authorization Profile: Implementaton”
Version: 1.1
Release Date: 10 January 2011
Officially Released: 24 February 2011
Status: Final
Editors: Jeff Kahn
Electronic Version: IMS Common Cartridge v1.1 Implementation
Title: “IMS Common Cartridge Profile:Conformance”
Version: 1.1
Release Date: 10 January 2011
Officially Released: 24 February 2011
Status: Final
Editors: Jeff Kahn
Electronic Version: IMS Common Cartridge v1.1 Conformance
Title: “IMS Common Cartridge Profile: Use Cases”
Version: 1.1
Release Date: 10 January 2011
Officially Released: 24 February 2011
Status: Final
Editors: Jeff Kahn
Electronic Version: IMS Common Cartridge v1.1 Use Cases
Title: “IMS Common Cartridge Profile: Apendices”
Version: 1.1
Release Date: 10 January 2011
Officially Released: 24 February 2011
Status: Final
Editors: Jeff Kahn
Electronic Version: IMS Common Cartridge v1.1 Appendices |
Terms of use
X
These contents have been obtained from the IMS web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the IMS web site for additional information on terms of use.
Print
General Information
Title: “IMS Common Cartridge Profile”
Version: 1.0
Release Date: 1 October 2008
Officially Released: 19 December 2008
Status: Public Draft
Editor: Kevin Riley
Electronic Version: IMS Common Cartridge v1 Public Draft
Title: “IMS Common Cartridge Authorization Web Service”
Version: 1.0
Release Date: 22 July 2008
Officially Released: 19 December 2008
Status: Public Draft
Editors: Kevin Riley, David Mills
Electronic Version: IMS Common Cartridge Authorization Web Service |
Terms of use
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These contents have been obtained from the IMS web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the IMS web site for additional information on terms of use.
Print
The specification defines a profile for the use of the following specifications which are (in the versions adopted here), already widely implemented and in use across the community:
- IEEE LOM emcopasing:
- ISO 15836:2003: Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (mapped to the corresponding elements in LOM)
- IEEE 1484.12.1-2002: Learning Object Metadata
- IEEE 1484.12.3-2005: LOM Schema binding (loose binding)
- IMS Content Packaging v1.2
- IMS Question & Test Interoperability v1.2.1
- IMS Authorization Web Service v1.0
The LOM, Content Packaging and Question & Test Interoperability specifications have each been profiled to simplify their use. Thus their scope has been constrained to those features commonly implemented and in use by the community. Experience suggests that interoperability problems that have arisen with implementations of these specifications are frequently the result of differing interpretations of the specs and options being taken that lead to divergence in behavior. A key goal of the Common Cartridge specification therefore has been to provide a tighter definition of their use thus eliminating this divergence. The resulting profile also lends itself to more effective conformance testing of implementations. |
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