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After the presentation of all project deliverables by Simon GRANT (InLOC Project Leader), the WS proceeded to the formal balloting in order to approve the following draft CWAs:
  • Draft CWA 1: InLoc- Information Model for Learning Outcomes and Competences
  • Draft CWA 2: InLoc- Guidelines including the Integration of Learning Outcomes and Competences into existing specifications.

The above mentioned documents were published in the following CEN website for its public review until 2013.04.01: http://www.cen.eu/cen/Sectors/Sectors/ISSS/Pages/default.aspx. After the balloting process, both projects were approved by 14 affirmative votes and no votes against its final publication as a CWA.

With regard to the 3rd CWA which was in public review period until 2013-04-19 (beyond the date in which this meeting was held), the required balloting will be launched by the WS secretary through the LiveLink tool.
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The Semantic Web Interest Group has published a new draft for the vCard-in-RDF Ontology, edited by Renato Iannella and James McKinney. The new draft updates the previous version by aligning it with the latest IETF vCard specification, ie, RFC6350.
vCard in RDF Ontology
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The DC-2013 Special Session titled "Long-term Preservation and Governance of RDF Vocabularies" will be sponsored by W3C and will focuses on issues related to the usability of RDF vocabularies in the long term (as defined in "decades") including continued access to documentation, inheritance of ownership and maintenance responsibility, and the continued resolvability of domain names. The usability of Linked Data relies on the ability to interpret what the data means, which depends on the availability of the RDF vocabularies used in the data. RDF vocabularies are created by a wide range of people and institutions, from individual researchers to national libraries and for-profit corporations, for a wide range of descriptive requirements. The oldest RDF vocabularies in existence are just fifteen years old. It is time to look systematically at how ownership and responsibility for today's vocabularies will pass to the next generation.
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The general objective of the call for proposals is:

To encourage European policy cooperation to support – through ET 2020 - countries’ efforts to meet the objectives of Europe 2020, as reflected in the 2013 Annual Growth Survey and the Rethinking Education Communication, notably: developing skills for growth and competitiveness, strengthening youth employability and reducing early school leaving levels, in a context that prioritises efficient investment in education and training, by:
  • supporting awareness-raising and institutional commitment, coordination and partnership with all stakeholders to promote, in particular, skills for growth and competitiveness and youth employability (part A)
  • supporting the development, testing and evaluation, by means of field trials, of innovative policy solutions to reduce early school leaving. (part B)
The call also provides opportunities for ministries and stakeholders to test - in real life situations - the implementation of innovative policies (policy experimentations) addressing European goals.
This call for proposals comprises two separate parts:
  • Part A - Support to national implementation and awareness raising of the objectives of European cooperation in education and training (ET 2020).
  • Part B - Support to implementation of innovative policy solutions at institutional level to reduce early school leaving, in line with the priorities set out in Europe 2020 and ET 2020.
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IMS Global Announces the Educational App Store Project
Project Aimed at Creating a Reference Implementation Based on Marketplace Open Standards
09/04/2013
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Lake Mary, Florida, USA – 9 April 2013 - Can universities and school districts control their own online “store” of educational content and applications for easy access and use by students and faculty? Yes they can - and they will in only a few short years. Will such an “app store” be based on Apple, Google or Amazon?  No it will not.


The “take it or leave it” proprietary vertical integration strategies of consumer-oriented providers of digital books and applications, that maximizes their ability to create revenues from sales of such resources, have left educational institutions with a conundrum. Do we dare dictate to our students and teachers a “preferred platform?” Of course, the answer to that question needs to be “no.”


The good news is the majority of educational content and applications is not beholden to any of those consumer platforms. Leading providers of educational resources have instead rallied around open standards provided through community collaboration via the non-profit IMS Global Learning Consortium.  The IMS web site contains many examples of education segment specific applications and content that can be easily integrated into the academic enterprise using these open standards.


“Unfortunately the large suppliers to the consumer market don’t have much interest in the special requirements of educational institutions,” remarked Dr. Rob Abel, Chief Executive of IMS Global. “However, the educational segment is more than capable of guiding its own destiny with respect to making digital resources ‘work’ for the needs of their stakeholders. By working together to solve this problem, institutions reap huge savings by not becoming dependent on closed solutions.”


The Educational App Store Project has begun a design phase in which IMS member institutions are collaborating on requirements and user scenarios. Initial participants include Framingham State University, UCLA and University of Michigan. Initial designs will be presented at the IMS Learning Impact 2013 Conference, May 13-16, San Diego, CA, USA.


After the design phase completes it is expected that the IMS member organizations will collaborate on creating a reference implementation that will enable suppliers and/or institutions to easily replicate the model. Open APIs, based on IMS standards, will be provided to enable options for including content from the proprietary sources mentioned earlier, as well as resources built natively to use IMS open standards.
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Due to travel restrictions within the government, ADL is expanding local and virtual opportunities to interact with the community. Instead of the annual iFest conference, this year ADL will host a series of “PlugFest” events to showcase applications that use the Experience API and other learning technologies. Our intent is to host PlugFest events at the Alexandria, VA and Orlando, FL, ADL Co-Labs, and then present Webinar sessions of lessons learned, emerging learning trends, and other valuable information pertinent to our iFest audience. Please watch this site for PlugFest announcements and information about for monthly Webinar series. (To receive announcements via email, subscribe to the ADL Insights newsletter.)
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IMS Global Learning Consortium Releases Annual Report for 2012
Seven Years of Impressive Growth Now Enabling the Open Digital Innovation Revolution in Education
09/04/2013
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Lake Mary, Florida, USA - 1 April 2013 - The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS) today announced the release of the IMS annual report for 2012.  The annual report is available to the public online at: http://www.imsglobal.org/imsglobal2012annualreport.pdf. IMS provides the annual report as part of its policy of openness and transparency to members and stakeholders worldwide.

Another record year for IMS culminated in launching the IMS "Open Digital Innovation in Education Revolution" toward the end of 2012. The "revolutionary" aspects of IMS standards and APIs are many, including a 10-100x improvement in time, cost, information-richness and ease of use when compared to previous integration approaches. As of today, IMS has now issued more that 150 conformance certifications for plug and play interoperable applications and digital content. Over 13,000 reusable content packages (e.g. Common Course Cartridges) were validated using the IMS online validator in 2012, more than double the validations in 2011. In 2012 IMS also introduced the LTI Certified Product Catalog and a new web address showing all official certifications imscert.org to help facilitate the revolution.

The leaders of the IMS Open Digital Innovation Revolution in Education will be gathering at the annual IMS Learning Impact conference, May 13-16, in San Diego, California.
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The DCMI Metadata Provenance Task Group is collaborating with the W3C Provenance Working Group on a mapping from Dublin Core terms to the PROV provenance ontology, currently a W3C Proposed Recommendation.  More precisely, the document describes a partial mapping from DCMI Metadata Terms to the PROV-O OWL2 ontology -- a set of classes and properties usable for representing and interchanging information about provenance. Numerous terms in the DCMI vocabulary provide  information about the provenance of a resource.
Translating these terms into PROV relates this information explicitly to the W3C provenance model.

The mapping is currently a W3C Working Draft. The final state of the document will be that of a W3C Note, to be published as part of a suite of documents in support of a W3C Recommendation for provenance interchange.

DCMI would like to point to the W3C Note as a DCMI Recommended Resource and therefore encourages the Dublin Core community to provide feedback and take part in the finalization of the mapping.

The deadline for all comments is 7 April 2013.  We recommend that comments be provided directly to the public W3C list for comments:public-prov-comments@w3.org (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-prov-comments/), ideally with a Cc: to DCMI's dc-provenance list (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=dc-provenance).  Comments sent only to the dc-provenance list will be summarized on the W3C list and addressed, and discussions on the W3C list will be summarized back on the dc-provenance list when appropriate.

Stuart Sutton, Managing Director, DCMI
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The Science Of Computer Programmign international journal makes a call for papers for the preparation of a special issue entitled Special Issue on Software Development Concerns in the e-Learning Domain. The journal is indexed in the JCR with an impact factor of 0.622 in 2011.

The aim of this special issue is to collect high-quality, original research results concerning all the software development issues arising in the e-Learning application domain.  Solutions might focus on one or several software development concerns, by clearly describing how these arise and can be confronted during the development of e-Learning systems, and by illustrating them in the context of realworld working systems. In addition, in-depth evaluations supporting the proposed solutions might be strongly encouraged. Major topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Software Requirements Engineering in e-Learning
  • Evaluation of the usability of applications, systems and e-Learning platforms and user satisfaction (students, teachers, etc.)
  • Management of multidisciplinary / interdisciplinary teams of educators, domain experts and developers in the production and
  • maintenance of e-learning systems, applications and contents
  • Software architectures, modeling, specification, design and development of e-Learning systems
  • Testing, verification and validation of software in e-Learning
  • Formal methods in the development of e-Learning systems
  • Model-driven Software Development in e-Learning
  • Software Language Engineering and e-Learning

This special issue is promoted by Antonio Sarasa and José Luis Sierra, both members of the UCM group at the eMadrid Network.


Important dates

  • Paper submission: May 1, 2013
  • Acceptance notification:  January 31, 2014
  • Final papers: February 28, 2014
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Blacboard collaborate launches new IMS LTI and Moodle integrations
New Integrations Make it Easier to Use Web Conferencing Platform with Any LMS
11/03/2013
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Blackboard Collaborate™, the leading online collaboration platform built for education, now supports IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) specifications, making the platform available to institutions using any learning management system (LMS) compliant with LTI industry standards, the company announced today.

This latest software update enables institutions using any LTI-compliant LMS to provide a better overall learning experience with the addition of web conferencing tools to their online courses, increasing student interactivity and engagement. With the integration, instructors will be able to use Blackboard Collaborate to schedule and deliver live online classes, upload multimedia and presentation content, and store lecture recordings for students who missed class or for follow-up review, all from within the LMS and without having to log into more than one system. 

The integration will be hosted by Blackboard, removing the cost to maintain and support multiple systems. Little to no faculty training is required because the platform will adhere to the familiar look and feel of institutions' LMS of choice, removing barriers for faculty to incorporate online collaboration into their courses and enabling students to benefit from live, synchronous learning.

The company also announced integration updates across the Blackboard Collaborate platform specific to the open-source Moodle LMS. The platform's web conferencing, enterprise instant messaging and voice authoring capabilities are now compatible with Moodle 2.3 and are certified by Moodle Partners Moodlerooms and NetSpot.
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