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ASPECT - Overview

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About ASPECT
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Adopting Standards for European Educational Content
ASPECT is a new, 30-month Best Practice Network supported by the European Commission's eContentplus Programme that involves 22 partners from 15 countries, including 9 Ministries of Education (MoE), four commercial content developers and leading technology providers. For the first time, experts from all international standardisation bodies and consortia active in e-learning (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL) will work together in order to improve the adoption of learning technology standards and specifications.

Initially, 14 content providers add additional content (both professionally produced and user-generated by teachers/pupils) to a critical mass of educational resources in an existing Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) for schools. This is a federated network of 20 learning content repositories that has been developed by European Schoolnet and its supporting MoEs together with other partners that include the ARIADNE Foundation.

Technology providers and standards’ experts in the project work with ASPECT content providers to develop best practice approaches to implementing standards for both educational content discovery and use. Content providers apply these best practice approaches to a critical mass of resources in the expanded LRE. These resources are then validated with up to 40 schools in four countries in order to determine how the implementation of standards and specifications in the project leads to greater usability of LRE content. Based on this practical implementation of standards, which will be independently evaluated, ASPECT partners will feed the project’s experience into pre-standardisation activities and run an extensive set of dissemination actions that include international workshops, plugfests, regional events and an award. The aim is to involve a wider group of organisations in ASPECT BPN activities and to develop a unique co-operation framework for all stakeholders who will also benefit from a set of new support services that include: a LOR registry; Vocabulary Bank for Education; Application Profile registry; automatic translation service for LOM and content packaging formats; compliance testing; transformer services; and access to known interoperability issues.

As a result of its work, the ASPECT project will have a strategic impact on pre-standardisation activities and the ability of partners to submit and support proposals to European and international standardisation bodies. Together with the CALIBRATE and MELT projects, ASPECT will also help European Schoolnet and its supporting 28 MoE and partners to implement its strategic development plan for the LRE and provide standards’ based, high quality learning resources both to schools in Europe and globally.ASPECT Web Site
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Main objectives
The three overriding aims in the ASPECT Best Practice Network are to:
  1. Analyse how a range of standards and specifications compare in terms of how well they apply to a diverse range of learning resources from both commercial and public sector providers (including content generated by teachers).
  2. See how the implementation of standards and specifications will enhance the pan-European interoperability of educational resources and the systems that are used to develop, discover, transfer, and use that content.
  3. Establish best practices for combining existing specifications into complete solutions that address the needs of the school community in Europe in terms of discovery, exchange, and reuse of learning resources.
Specific Objectives
Specific objectives of the ASPECT Best Practice Network are then to:
  • Leverage existing consensus building and awareness-raising initiatives related to standards for educational content, including those of the main standards’ bodies and the new EdReNe Thematic Network supported by the eContentplus programme;
  • Enhance further an existing Learning Resource Exchange for schools with a critical mass of high quality educational resources that includes user-generated and professionally generated content from both Ministries of Education and private sector developers;
  • Move beyond existing consensus building and awareness raising by focusing on practical implementations of a range of content standards and specifications (including standards and specifications to support the discovery and exchange of this interoperable content) that both Ministries of Education and commercial developers regard as being of strategic importance for the school sector;
  • Analyse how a range of standards and specifications have been combined in order to be applied to ASPECT content and propose a strategy for how these implementation approaches can be taken to scale and adopted by a wider community of stakeholders, including MoEs, regional education authorities, large commercial publishers, SMEs and individual teachers;
  • Implement a dissemination strategy and engage in new forms of targeted and widespread awareness raising and consensus raising actions involving stakeholders in all 27 member states, with the aim of combating a perceived ‘disconnect’ between standards initiatives and end-users;
  • Validate with up to 40 schools in four countries to what extent the implementation of standards/specifications in the project leads to greater usability of ASPECT content and improvements in the ability of these resources to support the learning process in real-life contexts;
  • Evaluate to what extent work in ASPECT has a strategic impact on pre-standardisation activities and the ability of partners to submit and support proposals to European and international standardisation bodies.
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Project Partners
  • EUN Partnership a.i.s.b.l. (EUN); BE; Coordinator/content provider/technology provider
  • Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL); BE; Technology provider
  • Siveco Romania SA (SIVECO); RO; Content provider/school pilot
  • Cambridge University Press (Holdings) Ltd. (CUP); UK; Content provider
  • Universität Koblenz-Landau (KOB); DE; Technology provider
  • Instituto Nazionale di Documentazione per L'Innovazione e la Ricerca Educativa (INDIRE); IT; Content provider
  • RWCS Limited (RWCS); UK; Technology provider
  • Vocabulary Management Group (VMG); UK; Technology provider
  • Association EIfEL, European Institute for E-Learning (EIfEL); FR; Dissemination
  • Universidad Vigo (VIGO); ES; Dissemination
  • Icodeon; UK; Technology provider
  • Young Digital Planet S.A. (YDP); PL; Content provider
  • Svietimo Informaciniu Technologiju Centras Valstybes Biudzetine Istaiga (ITC); LT; Content provider/school pilot
  • EduCentrum (EduC); BE; Content provider/school pilot
  • UNI·C Danmarks EDB-Center for Uddan (UNI·C); DK; Dissemination
  • FWU Institut fur Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht GmbH. (FWU); DE; Content provider
  • DG Innovation and curriculum development - Ministry of Education (DGIDC); PT; Content provider/school pilot
  • University of Ljubljana (UL); SI; Content provider
  • Educatio Public Utility Company (EDUCATIO); HU; Content provider
  • The Open University (OU); UK; Content provider
  • Jyvaskylan Yliopisto, University of Jyvaskylan (JYU); FI; Evaluation
  • Centre National de Documentation Pedagogique (CNDP); FR; Content provider
Ministries of Education
ASPECT partners include nine Ministries of Education or national agencies nominated by Ministries to act on their behalf in the project.
  • MoE Denmark – UNI·C
  • MoE Belgium (Flemish community) - EduC
  • MoE France - CNDP
  • MoE Germany - FWU
  • MoE Hungary - EDUCATIO
  • MoE Italy - INDIRE
  • MoE Lithuania - ITC
  • MoE Portugal - DGIDC
  • MoE Slovenia – UL
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ASPECT Benefits
Make content standards work for you by becoming an ASPECT Associate Partner and:
  • Have the support of an international community
  • Participate in workshops using state-of-the-art technologies for developing, testing and playing digital content
  • Exploit the benefits of current standards (SCORM, Common Cartridge, LOM etc.) and tools
  • Contribute to standard’s definition, adoption and improvement
  • Participate in pilot projects
Description
ASPECT is working with a wide group of stakeholders. Organizations that have already joined ASPECT as an Associate Partner, attended ASPECT events or subscribed to the ASPECT newsletter include:
  • policy makers and technical staff in national Ministries of Education and
  • regional/municipal educational authorities
  • members of the standards' community
  • organisations building educational content repositories
  • commercial educational publishers
  • developers of both commercial content and open educational resources
  • tools' and learning platform developers and vendors
In 2010, the ASPECT dissemination activities will also be particularly seeking to engage with:
  • computer and ICT advisers in schools
  • libraries, museums, science centres and other organisations providing digital
  • resources to schools
  • educational broadcasters
Download the ASPECT Charter for Associate Partners here
Joint ASPECT as an Associate Partners
Organisations and individuals can participate in ASPECT Best Practice Network events by becoming an ASPECT Associate Partner. Membership of ASPECT is open to any organisation or individual that is able to contribute to its primary mission of helping stakeholders to define and adopt best practice related to the application of standards and specifications for digital content used in schools.

There is no fee involved in order to join ASPECT or to participate in its online community but organisations and individuals are required to meet all their own costs involved in attending ASPECT events.

ASPECT is particularly interested in working with organisations and individuals that can take an active part in both ASPECT events and the ASPECT online community. It is hoped that as many Associate Partners as possible will be able to participate in the practical implementation of standards and specifications being explored in the project (using their own content) and, based on this experience, contribute to the development of best practice related to this activity.

In order to register as an Associate Partner and be able to attend ASPECT events, organisations and individuals are asked to complete a short application form indicating why they are interested in joining the network and any particular skills or expertise they can offer to the network and other ASPECT members.Register and become an ASPECT Associate Partner here
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The following standards and specifications are being addressed in the project:
  • IEEE LOM. Dublin Core IEEE LOM and DC are well adopted. DC is for content in general while LOM is designed for educational content. The major need is to be able to transform metadata instances from one format into another. While solutions for mapping the default specifications exist, good solutions are lacking for specific application profiles of IEEE LOM and DC.
    ASPECT partners will make all their content available through the LOM.

  • XVD, VDEX, ZTHES, SKOS. ZThes has a wide adoption and the latest version has improved features for internationalisation. VDEX has a wide adoption as well. XVD is the most advanced specification supporting mappings between vocabularies and alternative structures but it has very little adoption at this stage. SKOS has currently the best approach to the mapping of vocabularies. Hence transformers between the formats should be offered to the wider audience of vocabulary developers. However, this is not sufficient. All too often it is the case that Application Profile developers invent vocabularies again and again. Apart from being inefficient, it harms the semantic interoperability of different application profiles. Given this situation, adoption can be best supported by providing a registry for vocabularies and mappings between vocabularies that allows for uploading and downloading in different formats.
    ASPECT will evaluate all specifications and adopt one or more as an input and/or output format of the European Vocabulary Bank (part of the ASPECT service centre). In addition the ASPECT will investigate to what extent mappings between these different specifications are possible.

  • SQI, SPI, SRU/SRW, OAI-PMH. SRU/SRW are well adopted in the library world. SQI has a good adoption in the European Learning Technology world and many MoEs have adopted it for exchanging LOM instances in the LRE. SQI has been developed in order to support more advanced features such as asynchronous communication and different query languages in federated LOR networks. It is our conclusion that SQI could be profiled to support SRU/SRW such that both specifications could be used in a federated search scenario. OAI-PMH is well adopted also in the European LT world. As it is dealing with a different scenario (harvesting), it can co-exist with the other specifications. SPI is at the specification stage. It is work planned under CEN/ISSS contract.
    ASPECT will evaluate all specifications and adopt one or more as for exchanging metadata and content. As a minimum all content providers will adopt SQI and/or OAI-PMH. In addition it will be investigated to what extend these specifications can be made interoperable through for example profiling or a run-time gateway. Finally ASPECT will co-operate with CEN/ISSS in order to test the new SPI specification.

  • CQL, PLQL, LRE-QL. These are all abstract query languages that operate on a conceptual model instead of, for instance, relational tables. They have been developed by different parties involved in federating LO repositories and are used to interrogate metadata following the IEEE LOM. In the end it would be better to have a single well thought through query language.
    ASPECT will thus first investigate this route and, if this is not possible, try to establish translation mechanisms. LRE-QL is already an application profile of PLQL.

  • SCORM, IMS Common Cartridge, IMS Content packaging. In Europe SCORM has been well adopted in training military personnel and to a large extent by commercial publishers, also especially for training purposes. However, the adoption in the school sector is limited. Cited barriers include the limited pedagogical models (primarily instructional design) that SCORM supports, as well as the steep learning curve demanded if one wishes to repurpose a SCO, a situation that occurs much more frequently in the school sector. IMS Common Cartridge is a specification under development that encompasses Content Packaging, Question &Test Interoperability (QTI), IEEE LOM and SCORM. Icodeon, an ASPECT partner and a member of IMS, is making available a Common Cartridge RESTful Web Services Platform that will be used by project partners. Other organisations currently implementing Common Cartridge may introduce their own implementation and present this more as a CC “Player”. As Common Cartridge is still, therefore, at the beginning of the adoption life cycle and project adoption support measures will primarily be in terms of awareness raising, and demonstrators. 
ASPECT will not address the barriers to SCORM take-up, as this will involve a long-term effort within the Learning Technology research and pedagogical communities. However, ASPECT will help content providers to use SCORM as well as apply Common Cartridge to content. As part of establishing best practice, the project will investigate what barriers exist for content providers in using these two specifications. 


  • IMS-QTI. IMS-QTI is reasonably well adopted and works well for what it is supposed to do. While the consortium recognizes that the educational world needs more advanced specifications to fully support assessment, this is not retained as an objective.
    ASPECT will help content providers to use IMS-QTI as part of the new IMS Common Cartridge specification.

  • CORDRA. CORDRA is a model that is not really adopted in Europe. One of the barriers is the confusion between the general model and its specific implementation and deployment within the US Department of Defense in the ADL-Registry. Nevertheless, it is an important specification. Specific elements, such as the Handle System for identifiers, is of particular interest.
    ASPECT will analyse and compare the technological options offered and set-up a demonstrator implementation to be used by content and metadata providers.

  • Creative Commons. The Creative Commons licensing scheme is by now well adopted. There are, however, some problems that hamper its adoption. First, as content providers are creating variants, interoperability of those variants becomes a problem. In addition, there is a usability problem. EUN’s experience is that, although Creative Commons is very simple, end-users such as teachers and learners make regular mistakes (about 30%) when uploading material.
    ASPECT will investigate these usability issues in order to improve the adoption and practice of Creative Commons.

  • ISO/IEC 19796-x. This quality standard, based on European pre-work in the CEN/ISSS workshop learning technologies will be adapted to the project’s needs. By nature, the process-oriented standard ISO/IEC 19796-1 is adaptable to different organizational contexts. The other parts of the standards series will also be used: ISO/IEC 19796-3 (reference methods and metrics) will be used to derive quality measures, ISO/IEC 19796-4 (good practice guide) will be input for the guidelines.
    ASPECT will implement those standards and provide feedback on the further development of those standards. This work will be performed as part of WP5 with the help of WP7.

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ASPECT is taking steps to address the potentially damaging ‘disconnect’ between standards bodies and experts on the one hand and educational policy makers, ICT advisers and practitioners on the other. It will ensure that best practice with regard to the implementation of standards and specifications for learning technologies (SSLT) will no longer be derived primarily via technical experts working on pilots and demonstrators and meeting together in workshops and plugfests.

By the end of the project, ASPECT will be actively working with at least 200 leading European experts, professionals and policy makers in Ministries of Education who can make a real impact on SSLT take-up. From the perspective of Ministries of Education taking part in project, a key result will be that teachers’ views as well as those of technical experts will have been considered during the pre-standardisation process.

In addition ASPECT partners will continue to be active contributors to all international standardisation bodies and consortia active in e-learning (CEN/ISSS, IEEE, ISO, IMS, ADL). The project will also specifically:
  • Help create at least two CEN Workshop Agreements (subject to approval by CEN/ISSS WSLT), one IMS specification (subject to approval by the IMS Global Learning Consortium) and two ENs created in TC353.
  • Make proposals and recommendations concerning how a number of standards can be combined in order to ensure more transparent forms of interoperability between learning content repositories and the wide variety of learning platforms in schools.
  • Enable stakeholders to better understand the merits of a range of different standards and specifications and how these can be applied to both professionally generated content and the growing volume of user-generated content from teachers and pupils.
  • Provide a new set of support services that will facilitate the interoperability of learning content. Implemented within a LRE Service Centre. These will start to become available in September 2009 and will be sustained beyond the end of the project. The LRE Service Centre will include a:
    • LOR registry
    • Vocabulary Bank for Education
    • Application Profile registry
    • Automatic Translation service for Learning Object Metadata and content packaging formats
    • Compliance testing
    • Transformer service, transforming metadata and vocabularies into another format
    • Access to known interoperability issues
  • Consolidation and further extend work that has already commenced related to the building of a pan-European Learning Resource Exchange service for schools.
  • Carry out a wide range of dissemination activities (including both international and country-specific public events, publication of five newsletters and an ASPECT Award) in order to create a sustainable framework within which stakeholders (at least 300 participants) can work together.
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Next it is the list of deliverables to be produced:
  • D1.1: Charter for ASPECT Associate Partners (month 3)
  • D1.3.1: Intermediate Public Report (month 15)
  • D1.3.2: Final Public Report (month 30)
  • D2.1: ASPECT approach to federated search and harvesting (month 6)
  • D2.2: Design of data model and architecture for a registry of LO repositories and app. profiles (month 6)
  • D2.3: ASPECT approach to multilingual vocabularies, including automated translation services (month 6)
  • D2.4: Moodle course or wiki with material from repository to support training and dissemination (month 6)
  • D2.5: Infrastructure and services v1.0 (month 9)
  • D2.6: Infrastructure and services v2.0 (month 18)
  • D2.7: Infrastructure and services v3.0 (month 27)
  • D3.1: Best practice report for content use (month 6)
  • D3.2.1: Conformance Testing Tools version 1 (month 9)
  • D3.2.2: Conformance Testing Tools version 2 (month 18)
  • D3.3: IMS CC & SCORM Demonstrator v1.0 (month 12)
  • D3.4: Intermediate Evaluation Report for content use (month 15)
  • D3.5: Best practice report for content use v2.0 (month 18)
  • D3.6: IMS CC & SCORM Demonstrator v2.0 (month 24)
  • D4.1: Dissemination Plan & Communication Handbook (month 6)
  • D4.2: ASPECT web site and community (month 2)
  • D4.3.1: PowerPoint presentations on project (initial) (month 3)
  • D4.3.2: PowerPoint presentation on project (final) (month 30)
  • D4.4.2: Report on ASPECT workshops, plugfests and conferences n 2 & 3 (month 30)
  • D4.5: ASPECT Network of Practitioners (month 6)
  • D4.5: Exploitation and Sustainability Plan (month 28)
  • D4.5.1: Report on ASPECT workshops, plugfests and conferences n 1 (month 15)
  • D4.6: ASPECT Award (month 18)
  • D4.7: LRE Service Centre (month 3)
  • D5.1: A critical mass of metadata that can be searched for and discovered seamlessly (month 18)
  • D5.2: A critical mass of content to which a set of preferred standards and specifications have been applied (month 18)
  • D5.3: Release 1 of the integrated system (month 15)
  • D5.4: Release 2 of the integrated system (month 24)
  • D5.5: Report on the advantages/issues associated with the large-scale implementation of selected standards (month 28)
  • D6.1: Customised version of LRE portal (month 6)
  • D6.2: Protocol of experimentation with national adaptations (month 8)
  • D6.3: Report on summer school (month 13)
  • D6.4: National Validation reports (month 27)
  • D6.5: Final Report on the Experimentation (month 28)
  • D7.1: Evaluation Plan (month 7)
  • D7.2: Quality Assurance Plan (month 12)
  • D7.3.1: Evaluation Report v1 (month 15)
  • D7.3.2: Final Evaluation Report (month 28)
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ASPECT LRE Technical & Semantic Interoperability Workshop - Presentations available!

( 25/06/2010 )
The European Schoolnet's Learning Resource Exchange and the ASPECT Best Practice Network organised a two-day workshop at the EUN Office in Brussels on 15 and 16 June 2010

The ASPECT LRE Technical & Semantic Interoperability Workshop was conducted in two parts. During the first part, each participant presented their repository infrastructure and the metadata scheme used to describe their digital resource collections.

During the second part of the workshop, interoperability tools and techniques were demonstrated and tested as an introduction to a discussion aimed at elaborating a plan for actually connecting the participating repositories’ infrastructures.

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ASPECT Newsletter 2

( 06/06/2010 )
The second ASPECT Newsletter (June 2010) has been published
Newsletter contents:

  • Teachers and content packaging standards
  • ASPECT Awards
  • ASPECT Webinars
  • ASPECT LRE Technical & Semantic Interoperability Workshop
  • SE@M’10 International Workshop
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Teachers and content packaging standards. Initial conclusions from the ASPECT evaluation

( 06/06/2010 )
Article written by Agueda Gras-Velazquez, European Schoolnet

The ASPECT project has organised three teacher workshops for a group of 40 mathematics and science teachers from Portugal, Lithuania, Romania and Portugal. All three workshops have combined straight-forward assignments with more free-browsing activities in order to obtain first-hand, direct feedback from the teachers. This article presents some of the preliminary findings of the third workshop held in Lisbon in May 2010. (read more)

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ASPECT Awards: Awarding Learning Technology Standards Adoption

( 06/06/2010 )
Publishers, Individual authors and schools creating digital learning resources are increasingly aware that Learning Technology Standards can assist them in making their content more visible, and easily accessible

In order to celebrate the achievements of all those who have already adopted Learning Technology Standards, and encourage further adoption, individuals and organisations will have the opportunity to apply for the ASPECT Award. The award criteria take into account Licensing, Metadata and Delivery.


To apply for the ASPECT Award, you need to submit one (or more) learning resource(s) to the eLearning Awards and provide the documentation demonstrating that it meets all the criteria for successful implementation of elementary learning technology standards. The submission dates will be published on this website in due course.


Awarding criteria

The criteria for the delivery of the award are the quality of the information provided in relation to:

  • Licensing: has the candidate attached a license to the submitted learning resource describing the terms of use? Is the Information about copyright status presented in a standardised format, e.g. CC NC-SA (Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Share Alike? Has the candidate explained why he/she has chosen that license.
  • Metadata: has the candidate filled-in a number of keywords or metadata to describe the learning resource? Does the information provided make it easy for someone to find the resources through a search (on the LRE or Google)?
  • Delivery: is the resource accessible and can be downloaded from a website or a repository (LRE, Global Grid for Learning etc.)?


A special attention will be given to candidates providing evidence that the resource can be used by people with disabilities (evidence could be the results of tests or testimonies from users with disabilities).


Submission

All entries must be submitted using the eLearning Awards submission procedure at elearningawards.eun.org. The submission dates will be published on this website in due course.


The learning resource must be available online and accessible on a learning repository for download (LRE, Grid). If the candidate does not have access to a repository, ASPECT will provide a sandbox where it is possible to upload the resource.


When supporting documentation requires information that can’t be contained in the PDF file, a web link and required identification/login data should be provided to the judges.


NB: it is the responsibility of the candidate to ensure that the link and identification/login are working properly at all times.


Prize

The winner of the ASPECT Awards will be invited to receive their award and be a guest at the EMINENT conference and the eLearning Awards ceremony organised in Copenhagen in November 2010.


Eligibility

Schools and teacher training institutions in Europe are eligible for the eLearning Awards. EU/EEA countries, EU Candidate Countries, Georgia, Israel and Switzerland are eligible. Entries must be submitted via the eLearning Awards website by the closing date.


Legal and ethical issues

Entries should comply with all legal requirements in the country of submission and follow European agreements on copyright. They should conform to current advice from Insafe (www.saferinternet.org) on privacy, e-safety and protection of children online. Short quotations may be used if the source is clearly indicated. Pictures, film, sound and other multimedia may be used only if the owner has explicitly permitted use, or if taken from copyright-free sources.


Entries submitted to the eLearning Awards remain the property of the school/organisation or teacher. During the registration process, you will be asked to provide a Creative Commons licence for your content. Entries submitted in the eLearning Awards will be published: on the eLearning Awards portal; and on the EUN’s Learning Resource Exchange portal at lreforschools.eun.org

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ASPECT Summer School in Lisbon

( 14/05/2010 )
The aim of this Summer School was particularly to explore how learning content standards can be exploited by teachers and how different types of “content packaging” can add value to the learning experience
During the ASPECT project’s Summer School on 8 May in Estoril (Portugal) over 40 teachers from Belgium, Lithuania, Portugal and Romania came together to discuss the use of online learning resources and learning content repositories in mathematics and science lessons. The aim of this Summer School was particularly to explore how learning content standards (such as SCORM and Common Cartridge) can be exploited by teachers and how different types of “content packaging” can add value to the learning experience.

Read here some quotes from the teachers and national coordinators who took part in the Summer School:

Pascal Craye, teacher coordinator, KlasCement
"You can gain a lot of time as a result of standardisation. You can reuse resources easily, but it will take some time to convince teachers."

José Moura Carvalho, teacher coordinator, Ministry of Education, Portugal
"In Portugal it's a usual situation that teachers create many resources themselves but they are not used to sharing them. [...] If the Ministry of Education accepts the standardisation used, for example in the LRE portal, there will be more interoperability in resources and repositories."

Elder, teacher, Portugal
"I went to the ASPECT portal, I picked the SCORM version of the file I wanted to use and I imported it to my computer. Then I uploaded it to Moodle and that's it. It's simple and the format was the same as the original file."

Delia Oprea, Siveco, Romania (ASPECT content provider)
"All our content is packed with SCORM and in the future we might have double packaging including also Common Cartridge. I see only advantages in using content standards."

Norbertas, information and communication teacher, Lithuania
"I was familiar with SCORM before but today I discovered also Common Cartridge and for me it is more useful. Usually you need to delete or add new activities or modify the course and when you use Common Cartridge you can do it. It is very simple to import the resource to your lesson plan."

More news about the Summer School will follow!

more information

IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces Public Review Period of Basic Learning Tools Interoperability Standards

( 18/02/2010 )
Education global market leaders have pledged overwhelming support to provide seamless support for interactions among web-based learning applications and content as a service
IMS Global Learning Consortium


The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) today announced the public review of the first phase of the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standards to allow open and seamless integration of educational web applications. Called “Basic LTI or BLTI,” this first standard addresses the most common roadblocks to achieving a seamless experience for teachers and students. BLTI replaces the proliferation of vendor-specific APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) across learning/course management systems, course authoring apps, collaboration apps, e-Book apps, homework apps, assessment apps, e-Portfolio apps, etc.

Release for public review indicates that IMS GLC has conducted extensive prototyping and testing among the industry leaders, developed open source code to aid implementation, and developed initial conformance testing support. Public review will remain open for a time to be determined by the Common Cartridge/LTI Accredited Profile Management Group in IMS GLC. Basic LTI development has been spearheaded by Dr. Charles Severance, IMS Affiliates Coordinator, author, professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and former Executive Director of the open source Sakai learning management system project.

“We are very pleased with the unprecedented support for BLTI and LTI in the educational community,” said Dr. Rob Abel, Chief Executive Officer of IMS GLC. “These standards are a radical departure from prior educational content standards. The basic assumption of BLTI and LTI is that the online teaching and learning experience is a rich mash-up of web-hosted applications that seamlessly interact and are also integrated with the educational enterprise. There is no doubt that the unparalleled adoption of these standards indicates that the next phase of learning and course management is coming fast. ”

The following organizations have indicated they are supporting or intend to support the Learning Tools Interoperability family of standards: ASPECT, Blackboard Inc., CaféScribe, Cengage Learning, Compass Knowledge Group, CourseSmart LLC, Daidalos B.V., Desire2Learn Incorporated, Elsevier Health Sciences, Etudes, European Schoolnet, Follett, Giunti Labs, IMathAS, Jenzabar, Learning Objects Inc. Campus Pack Fusion, LearningMate Solutions Private Ltd., McGraw-Hill Education, Melete, Moodle, National Research Council of Canada (Institute for Information Technology), Nisai Virtual Academy, The Open University, Pearson, Penn State University, Sakai, SigongMedia Co. Ltd, SunGard Higher Education, Sungkyunkwan University, Ucompass.com, Unicon Inc., Univeritat Oberta de Catalunaya, University Koblenz-Landau, University Maryland University College (UMUC), University of Michigan , Wimba, Xyleme Inc..

Statements of Support:

“This is an important milestone for the e-learning community, and we are pleased to have partnered with the IMS team in this effort which can have a significant, real world impact for institutions,” said Ray Henderson, president of Blackboard Learn. Blackboard, as co-chair of the LTI working group, is committed to making tools for learning easy to integrate into Course Management Systems.  “Today, Blackboard and WebCT clients can take advantage of a Building Block and Powerlink at the OSCELOT community (http://www.oscelot.org) developed by Stephen Vickers at the University of Edinburgh and support from the Blackboard Platform Evangelism Team. We remain committed to pushing forward on this and other open educational standards in partnership with IMS for the benefit of our customers and the learning community at large .” 

"Pearson supports Basic LTI and our Third Party Interoperability (TPI) framework leverages LTI to enable external applications to seamlessly integrate with Pearson applications,” said Jim Behnke, Chief Learning Officer with Pearson. ”These standards offer educators significant advantages when adopting and deploying Pearson’s widely used teaching and learning applications, including the discipline-specific MyLabs and Pearson LearningStudio. We're honored to have played an active role in developing the LTI and Basic LTI standards, which reflects our commitment to interoperability standards in education.”

"We are thrilled with the release of BLTI," said Annie Chechitelli, Vice President of Product Management at Wimba.  "As a co-chair of the full LTI working group, Wimba understands its power to impact the entire learning community.  Now institutions can reduce support and training costs, solution providers like Wimba can reduce development costs, and ultimately - teachers, administrators, and students - benefit from a richer and more cost-effective ecosystem."

"The University of Michigan (U-M) has been using IMS Basic LTI in production for over a year, and it has allowed U-M to integrate a wide variety of campus servers and services into our enterprise LMS system (CTools).  Instead of having to rewrite these popular services as Sakai tools, U-M can easily integrate them into CTools by using IMS Basic LTI." - John Leslie King, Vice Provost for Academic Information, University of Michigan

"We congratulate IMS Global Learning Consortium on the public release of Basic LTI, and are excited to see the growing range of integrated applications that are becoming possible for our partners and clients" states Jeremy Auger, COO, Desire2Learn Incorporated.  "It has been great working with the IMS team to test and demo these integrations, and we look forward to joint webcasts with IMS in March as part of our continuing commitment to the support of standards and extensibility.”

“Our adoption of Basic LTI allows other systems to take advantage of Campus Pack Fusion's social media tools, seamlessly and without special customization. This benefits our users by providing more freedom to assemble the technologies they desire in a reliable manner, and allows Learning Objects to focus on evolving Campus Pack Fusion.  We look forward to wide industry adoption of LTI.” - Hal Herzog, VP of Product Strategy

“The Sakai community is extremely pleased to see the Basic LTI specification moving forward. We believe educational institutions will need the option to create best-of-breed solutions by integrating multiple applications, whether those applications are deployed in the enterprise or running in the cloud. LTI promises to make those integrations very easy and we intend to implement it in our forthcoming 2.7 release and as a fundamental part of Sakai 3.” – Michael Korcuska, Executive Director, Sakai Foundation

"We are very happy to have Basic LTI support in the latest release of Etudes and Melete.  Basic LTI allows innovative teachers to experiment with new tools and ideas and provides a way to integrate high quality publisher content into Etudes." - Vivie Sinou, Executive Director,
Etudes, Inc.

“The IMS Global Learning Consortium is making great strides in developing open standards and interoperability specifications for learning applications, and we are proud to support the Learning Tools Interoperability Project Group,” said Robert A. Maginn, Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Jenzabar. “The IMS Basic LTI guidelines allow faculty members to choose from a wide range of compatible learning tools and instructional materials that extend the power of learning platforms. Jenzabar has embraced the IMS Basic LTI tools and resources to enrich our collaborative learning environment, e-Racer, and provide new efficiencies to students and faculty.”

"We are pleased to be working with the IMS Global Learning Consortium and industry colleagues on developing effective standards and protocols for learning tool interoperability," said Bill Rieders, Executive Vice President of Global New Media, Cengage Learning. "Cengage Learning is committed to offering innovative educational materials that improve learning outcomes, and we believe that this process will help the industry to move quickly and seamlessly toward the next generation of effective learning solutions."

“We at CourseSmart have been enthusiastic supporters and adopters of IMS GLC Learning Tools Interoperability initiative.  We believe that educational improvement doesn’t stop at providing every student with high-definition, lightweight and searchable eTextbooks.  LTI further enables educational excellence by enabling transparent but secure integration with other great educational technologies to create compelling, cross-media mashups of content including assessments, interactive video, audio, and outcomes. We look forward to using LTI to help our various stakeholders achieve this vision.” - Sean Devine, CEO of CourseSmart, LLC

"We are very happy about the advances in Basic LTI and looking forward to using this standard for integration across campus portals, learning management systems, and other enterprise systems in higher education." – John A. Lewis, Chief Software Architect, Unicon, Inc.

“Giunti labs witnesses increasing Common Cartridge and LTI requests from its publishing and educational customer base and plans to incrementally add such features to its eXact packager Authoring tool and Harvestroad Hive DR and learn eXact LCMS platforms. A Common Cartridge export feature is already piloted in our eXact packager authoring suite including exporting to Common Cartridge packaging format with QTI assessments and external linking to Publishers online resources.” – Fabrizio Cardinali, Chief Executive Officer of Giunti Labs

"ASPECT is a Best Practice Network, funded in part by the European Commission, that supports the take-up of open standards in eLearning. The Aspect consortium is keen to explore the potential of the BLTI specification. Its use in the next version of the Common Cartridge specification will enable ASPECT members to enrich their eLearning content with exciting new forms of interactivity." - David Massart, ASPECT Project Manager, European Schoolnet

“We believe that the release of LTI will give software vendors the opportunity to focus on their strengths, while it gives the educational market more freedom of choice in fulfilling their ICT strategy.” - Remi van Zelst, Commercial manager Daidalos

“BLTI is a significant step towards simplifying student and teacher experiences as they navigate the complex application environment that underlies learning and teaching today.” - Ganesh Kumar, VP Technology Solutions, LearningMate

“As a vendor dedicated to open XML formats and ease of interoperability, Xyleme fully supports dynamic e-books enabled by the IMS Common Cartridge and LTI standards. In fact, Xyleme was an early adopter of the ePub standard for educational publishers and we will continue our strict adherence to IMS and other critical learning standards.”  Mark Hellinger, President & CEO of Xyleme

 
About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC)

IMS Global Learning is a nonprofit member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in higher education, K-12, and corporate education worldwide. IMS GLC members are leading corporations, higher education institutions, school districts and government organizations worldwide that are enabling the future of education by developing interoperability standards and adoption practices for educational and learning technology.  IMS GLC also sponsors Learning Impact: a global awards program and conference that recognizes the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality. For more information, visit www.imsglobal.org. For inquiries about LTI or Basic LTI, including advice for end-user institutions and school districts, use the web form here: http://www.imsglobal.org/contactus.cfm
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ASPECT Newsletter 1

( 15/01/2010 )
The first ASPECT Newsletter (December 2009) has been published
Summary of the ASPECT Newsletter Issue 1 (December 2009):
  • Visit us at BETT 2010!
  • ASPECT tools and services update
  1. SCORM and Common Cartridge?
  1. ASPECT Metadata
  • New Look LTSO
  • ASPECT workshops and plugfests in 2010
more information

Technical Course on the "Federation of Learning Repositories for Agriculture, Food & Environment (AgLRs)"

( 16/10/2009 )
Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content
A Technical Course on the "Federation of Learning Repositories forAgriculture, Food & Environment (AgLRs)" will take place duringNovember 2nd-5th, 2009. The Course is realised by the cooperation oftwo eContentplus projects (Organic.Edunet and ASPECT) and the Food& Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It will be hosted at the FAO Sub-regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe(SEUR), in Budapest, Hungary. The course is targeted to technical personnel of existing/operating AgLRs or of organizations/initiativesproducing learning resources of rural interest (interested in settingup an AgLR).more information

ASPECT Test System now available

( 11/09/2009 )
Tools and support services to facilitate the interoperability of learning contentTo assist stakeholders involved in applying standards and specifications for learning technologies, ASPECT is providing a new set of tools and support services that will facilitate the interoperability of learning content.

Tools developed in the project can be accessed below. Later this year, the project will also launch a Service Centre that provides the following services:

  • Identity service (based on the handle)
  • Metadata translation service
  • Metadata transformation service
  • Metadata validation service
  • Vocabulary Bank for Education
  • Learning Object Repository registry (early prototype)
  • Harvesting back service
Become an ASPECT Associate Partner or register for ASPECT News and we will keep you updated as new ASPECT tools and services become available - register

ASPECT Test System

The ASPECT Test System allows you to test xml files for compliance with the “Learning Resource Exchange Metadata Application Profile Version 4.0”. Please download here the version appropriate for your operating system and unzip it. The unzipped directory, at the top level, will contain the test system which you launch using a current Java Runtime Environment. After launching the test system, determine in the Configuration tab the directory where the reports should be saved. At the Test Packages tab, Add the instance documents you intend to Validate. For more information, please see the ASPECT Deliverable 3.2.1


Web site

The Learning Resource Exchange wins an IMS Award at Learning Impact 2009!

( 21/05/2009 )
In the category for Best Cross-National SolutionDavid Massart, European Schoolnet’s Senior Manager for IT Research & Development, welcomed the award and said, “European Schoolnet is delighted to receive this recognition from IMS for the work we have been doing in order to expose content in the LRE federation that ‘travels well’ and that can cross national and linguistic borders.”

The LRE was officially launched as a publicly available service to schools by European Schoolnet and its supporting Ministries of Education in December 2008 http://lreforschools.eun.org. Currently it offers over 130,000 learning resources and assets including content from 17 Ministries of Education in Europe and a growing number of Associate Partners both in Europe and the US.

At Learning Impact 2009, Jim Ayre, Senior Adviser delivered a presentation on how the LRE has been developed in a series of large-scale projects funded by the European Commission. This work is now being taken forward in the ASPECT project which is developing best practice concerning how standards and specifications can be applied to LRE content.

During the IMS conference, Warwick Bailey, Director of Icodeon, a partner in the ASPECT project, also provided a presentation on the Icodeon Common Cartridge Platform and Player. Content using this new IMS specification will be tested with schools in the ASPECT project in order to determine whether Common Cartridge improves the usability and re-usability of LRE learning resources.The LRE Web Site

IMS Global Learning Consortium and the European Union Commission ASPECT Project Announce Partnership

( 12/02/2009 )
Memorandum of Understanding promises to enhance the cooperation in establishing best practice network for Common Cartridge and Learning Object Discovery and Exchange for the K-12 Schools segment
IMS Global Learning Consortium
Long Beach, California, Lake Mary, Florida, USA and Brussels, Belgium – 12 February 2009 – The nonprofit IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) and European Schoolnet, on behalf of the European Union Commission ASPECT project, announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at the IMS GLC Special Summit on Next-Generation Digital Learning & Content.

The Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content (ASPECT) project (http://aspect-project.org/), is a Best Practice Network coordinated by European Schoolnet and supported by the European Commission's eContentplus Programme that involves 22 partners from 15 countries, including 9 Ministries of Education (MoE), aiming to improve the adoption of learning technology standards and specifications in Europe. The MOU specifies cooperative activities between IMS GLC and ASPECT in several areas. First, the parties will cooperate on the dissemination and best practice in implementing the IMS Common Cartridge standard for distributed digital learning content and assessments in a collaborative learning context. Second, the MOU specifies cooperation in developing region-specific application profiles of the IMS specifications and developing conformance tests according to the processes established by the IMS Common Cartridge Alliance (http://www.imsglobal.org/cc/alliance.html). Third, the MOU specifies collaboration with the ASPECT community on the IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange (LODE) project (http://www.imsglobal.org/lode.html).

“We are extremely pleased to see such a strong interest in the IMS Common Cartridge and LODE projects from across the European Community,” remarked Dr. Rob Abel, Chief Executive of IMS Global Learning. “The goal of our work is to enable increased creativity and innovation in supporting and enhancing digital learning, an area in which Europe excels.”

“The ASPECT Best Practice Network is a key channel in Europe for disseminating information and best practice related to the implementation of the IMS Common Cartridge standard,” says Dr. David Massart, from European Schoolnet, the ASPECT Project Manager. “Both public and private sector partners in ASPECT are particularly eager to see how this new IMS standard can enhance the pan-European interoperability of educational resources in European Schoolnet’s new Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) service for schools. We welcome this MOU also as an opportunity to feed European experience into the future work on global technical standards in eLearning.”

IMS Global Contributing Member European Schoolnet is providing leadership for the ASPECT project and the IMS LODE activity. IMS Global Contributing Member Icodeon is providing and supporting the Icodeon Common Cartridge Player and providing support for the IMS SCORM® (SCORM is a Registered Trademark of the United States Department of Defense) to Common Cartridge conversion tool, which was sponsored by Microsoft, to the ASPECT project. IMS Global Contributing Member Open University UK is participating in ASPECT as a leading provider of Common Cartridge materials. IMS Contributing Member and Global Academic Affiliate University Koblenz-Landau is providing expertise in using the IMS Profiling and Test Tools.

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC)
IMS Global Learning is a global, nonprofit, member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in the education and corporate learning sectors worldwide. IMS GLC members provide leadership in shaping and growing the learning industry through community development of interoperability and adoption practice standards and recognition of the return on investment from learning and educational technology. For more information, including the world's most comprehensive set of learning technology interoperability standards, information on the annual Learning Impact conference and awards program, and free community resources for learning technology leaders, visit http://www.imsglobal.org.

About European Schoolnet (EUN)
European Schoolnet (EUN) is a not-for-profit organization supported by 31 Ministries of Education in Europe dedicated to supporting schools in the best use of technology in learning, promoting the European dimension in schools and education and improving and raising the quality of education in Europe. Created in 1997, it has coordinated a series of major projects over the last seven years concerned with the technical and semantic interoperability of educational repositories and content. For more information, visit http://www.eun.org and http://aspect-project.orgDownload PDF

IMS Webinar: Learning Information Services

From 12/10/2010 to 12/10/2010

IMS Global Learning Consortium

The IMS GLC Learning Information Services (LIS) specification is designed to simplify the integration of student information systems with e-learning systems e.g. learning management systems, assessment systems, etc. Deployments in Higher Education and K-12/Schools are now occurring from many SIS and LMS suppliers. Join us as we explain the LIS specification and its uses, and describe the conformance programme being established by IMS GLC.
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SE@M 2010

Fourth International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning MaterialsBarcelona, Spain - From 27/09/2010 to 27/09/2010

Adopting Standards for European Educational Content

CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION

Over the last fifteen years, considerable effort has been spent on the development of standards and specifications in order to improve the interoperability of e-learning systems, repositories, and content. These efforts have led to significant improvements in the arena of technical interoperability enabling the emergence and expansion of successful federations and alliances of learning object repositories such as the LRE, ARIADNE, GLOBE, etc. Building blocks for this success have been the creation, evolution and adoption of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM), the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and the Simple Query Interface (SQI). More recent developments in this field include the definition of a Simple Publishing Interface (SPI) and the ongoing work within the IMS Global Learning Consortium on the Learning Object Discovery & Exchange (LODE) specification to facilitate the discovery and retrieval of learning objects stored across more than one collection. The development of best practices (for example by projects like ASPECT and ICOPER), enabling more efficient use of these standards and specifications, has also proven instrumental in the successes of current learning content retrieval infrastructures.

Given the significant improvements in the technical infrastructures allowing for the exchange of learning objects and metadata, attention of domain experts is now increasingly turning to the development and implementation of solutions to enhance semantic interoperability.  There is also a need to better optimize techniques for the management of controlled vocabularies and to guarantee interoperability between different application profiles.   A series of other issues are yet to be resolved including best-practices and tools for access control to learning resources and issues of privacy and data protection in the context of e-learning.

To further developments in this field, the main goal of this international workshop is to offer a forum where researchers and practitioners can discuss theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and share the latest advances in the state of the art and practices for exchanging and describing learning content. This year's workshop will include presentations of both long and short refereed papers as well as panel discussions, keynotes and demonstrations.

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IMS LODE and Resource Repositories

Co-organized by ASPECT and IMS GLCFrom 21/09/2010 to 21/09/2010

Adopting Standards for European Educational Content

Date and time: September 21st, 2010. 5 PM CEST (4 PM GMT)
Presenters: David Massart and Elena Shulman, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
Learn about the IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange (LODE) specification and how it is being used in digital resource repositories.

A series of webinars is now available from the ASPECT project to promote the adoption of learning technology standards by publishers, content/tools' developers and educational institutions. Although technical, these workshops are accessible to non-technical people as the objective is to understand the benefits of standards. Webinars run  on the second and 4th Tuesday of each month. Duration is 1 hour, and participants can join 30 minutes in advance on the Elluminate Live! platform.

The webinar will introduce the LODE specification and illustrate some of the possibilities it offers with examples from the Learning Resource Exchange and the ASPECT project. More info

IMS Webinar: Addressing Student Retention and Institution-specific Learning Technology Procurement

From 07/09/2010 to 07/09/2010

IMS Global Learning Consortium

 As the leader of your K-12 district's or higher education institution's e-learning efforts, what does IMS have to offer you in the areas of best practices to guide your learning technology selection and procurement decisions; and, how can IMS adoption practices aid in your ability to attract and retain e-learning students?  Take a district or institutional assessment to gauge your current student retention best practices against a model created by an international group of e- learning leaders, and use this information to implement the IMS Student Induction to e-Learning adoption practice.  Apply the IMS Enterprise Learning Systems and Applications Procurement adoption practice to help guide the selection and procurement of your school's learning management system - ensuring that the selection process addresses key functional, technical (including IMS interoperability standards) and end-user requirements that meet the needs of all stakeholders.
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IMS Webinar: Run Course Content Anywhere

The IMS Global Learning Consortium has been working with a critical mass of content suppliers and LMS vendors on a standard called Common Cartridge.From 24/08/2010 to 24/08/2010

IMS Global Learning Consortium

 A persistent challenge, for the creators of course content, learning platform administrators, and instructors, has been that different learning platforms have needed different course content packaging.  The way you had to assemble materials for one learning management system (LMS) was not necessarily going to work on another LMS.  The IMS Global Learning Consortium has been working with a critical mass of content suppliers and LMS vendors on a standard called Common Cartridge.  Come hear how this packaging convention has been implemented widely and how the promise of a universal solution is at hand.
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IMS/ASPECT Webinar: Teachers’ use of IMS Common Cartridge

Presenters: Dr. Agueda Gras-Velazquez (European Schoolnet) and Kati Clements (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) From 13/07/2010 to 13/07/2010

IMS Global Learning Consortium

 During a Summer School organized by the ASPECT project, 40 mathematics and science teachers from Portugal, Lithuania, Romania and Portugal were asked to work with different content packaging standards. The teachers were very enthusiastic about Common Cartridge content packaging. After importing a CC package into Moodle, the teachers could remove parts that they did not need, edit the content and change the order of different resources. Many teachers requested instructions on how to adapt Moodle to use Common Cartridge packages and some teachers expressed an interest in using Common Cartridge to package their own content in order to share it with other teachers.

Before the Lisbon workshop, Agueda Gras-Velazquez, who organized the event, had anticipated that some teachers might be enthusiastic about Common Cartridge. However, while she thought teachers would appreciate the possibility of importing a cartridge into Moodle and then moving and/or changing some parts of the resource, she was unprepared for the high level of positive reaction that was witnessed. (more information on the ASPECT Summer School available at http://aspect-project.org/node/84)

This webinar will present the results of the ASPECT Summer School and explain why common cartridge is particularly well-suited to address teachers’ needs.
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ASPECT Webinar: Conformance Testing

Presenter: Ingo Dahn, CEO of the Knowledge Media Institute, University of Koblenz, GermanyFrom 22/06/2010 to 22/06/2010

The ASPECT Webinar: Conformance Testing runs at 12 am CET (11 am GMT). Duration is 1 hour, and participants can join 30 minutes in advance.

Webinar Contents:
  • Application profiles: what are they? Why do we need them?
  • Conformance testing: what is conformance? How can it be tested?
  • Hands on testing: demonstration of conformance testing, interpretation of error messages.
Presenter: Ingo Dahn, CEO of the Knowledge Media Institute, University of Koblenz, Germany

Dr. Ingo Dahn,  has a habilitation in Mathematics from Humboldt University Berlin. Being trained as a specialist in Mathematical Logic, he moved in 1998 from Humboldt University Berlin to the Artificial Intelligence Group at the University in Koblenz. He has developed Slicing Book Technology which used AI methods for the semantic search and aggregation of legacy data. Dr. Dahn is a member of the IMS Technical Advisory Board and one of the authors of the IMS Application Profiling Guidelines.
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ASPECT Workshop

LRE Technical & Semantic InteroperabilityBrussels, Belgium - From 15/06/2010 to 16/06/2010

The European Schoolnet Learning Resource Exchange and the ASPECT Best Practice Network are inviting a small number of key organizations to a two-day workshop at the EUN Office in Brussels on 15 and 16 June 2010.

The ASPECT LRE Technical & Semantic Interoperability Workshop will be conducted in two parts. During the first part, each participant will present their repository infrastructure and the metadata scheme used to describe their digital resource collections. Each presentation will be followed by a discussion focusing on the interoperability problems that, according to the other participants, need to be addressed in order for them to access the presented collection. During the second part of the workshop, interoperability tools and techniques will be presented, demonstrated, and possibly tested as an introduction to a discussion aimed at elaborating a plan for actually connecting the participating repositories’ infrastructures.

The workshop is intended for developers, repository administrators, and technical and semantic interoperability specialists of the represented organizations.

There is a limited number of seats for this event and thus registration will be on a first come, first served basis.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Dr. Elena Shulman (elena.shulman@eun.org).
ASPECT Workshop

ASPECT Webinar: Content Packaging

Presenter: Lars Ingesman, senior consultant at UNI-C, DenmarkFrom 08/06/2010 to 08/06/2010

The ASPECT Webinar: Content Packaging runs at 12 am CET (11 am GMT). Duration is 1 hour, and participants can join 30 minutes in advance.

Webinar Contents:
  • Content packaging: what is it for? Why do we need it?
  • IMS Common Cartridge: how is a package structured? How to create a package? How to play a package?
  • Hands on: demonstration of the construction of Common Cartridge packages, testing of packages, interpretation of error messages

Presenter: Lars Ingesman,senior consultant at UNI-C, Denmark

Lars Ingesman holds an MA in English and German from the University of Aurhus and has studied at the University of Edinburgh, Centenary College in Shreveport, and the Technical University of Berlin. He is a senior consultant at UNI-C, the Danish Computing Centre for Research and Education.

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ASPECT Webinar: Common Cartridge

Presenter: Warwick Bailey, Icodeon Director, UKFrom 25/05/2010 to 25/05/2010

The ASPECT Webinar: Common Cartridge runs at 12 am CET (11 am GMT). Duration is 1 hour, and participants can join 30 minutes in advance.

Webinar Contents:
  • What is the IMS Common Cartridge Specification? What are the differences with SCORM?
  • What are the different components of a cartridge: contents, discussions, access control, etc.?
  • How to integrate Common Cartridge elements in a social network?
  • How does the Icodeon Common Cartridge Platform differ from other platforms?
Presenter: Warwick Bailey, Icodeon Director, UK

Warwick Bailey is founding Director of Icodeon Ltd, an e-Learning products and services enterprise. Warwick is a board member of an MIT/Microsoft iCampus project and a contributor to the JISC national e-Learning Framework. Warwick has worked with implementations of SCORM and IMS specifications in VLEs, item banks and web services. Icodeon has recently released the Icodeon Sequencing Engine that enables vendors to rapidly add SCORM 2004 sequencing functionality to their products.


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ASPECT International workshop for teachers

Over 40 teachers from Belgium, Lithuania, Romania and Portugal will participateLisbon, Portugal - From 07/05/2010 to 08/05/2010

Adopting Standards for European Educational Content

The ASPECT International workshop for teachers will be held in Lisbon on 7-8 May 2010. Over 40 teachers from Belgium, Lithuania, Romania and Portugal will participate in the ASPECT project's International workshop to discuss the use of learning resources and learning content repositories in maths and science lessons.

The workshop will particularly explore how learning content standards (such as SCORM and Common Cartridge) can be exploited by teachers and how different types of "content packaging" can add value to the learning experience. As well as this face-to-face workshop, the ASPECT project will launch a series of online webinars on technical issues related to learning content standards on May 25th. Details of these will appear shortly on the ASPECT web site.
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Making Learning Technology Standards Workshop

Produzir normas para as tecnologias de aprendizagemLisbon, Portugal - From 08/03/2010 to 08/03/2010

Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content

Workshop agenda

Note: The panel will be conducted in Portuguese. There will be no translation service.


17:00    Welcome, DGIDC representative

17:10    Learning technology standards: a state of the art review,
              Warwick Bailey, Icodeon
              Introduction to learning technology standards (why do we need them, benefits, etc.)
              State of the art (CC, SCORM, Metadata, Vocabularies, etc.) and the future of standards

17:30    How do we use standards? Panel discussion with Portuguese actors representing key sectors
               Prof. José Luís Ramos, University of Évora
               Teresa Campos – Institute for Museums and Conservation
               Rui Pacheco, Porto Editora
            
18:10    Questions and answers

18:20    Demonstration of the Learning Resources Exchange (LRE) Service Centre, How does it work?
               From creation of contents to delivery.
              Lars Ingesman, UNI-C, David Massart, European Schoolnet

18:45    Questions and answers

19:00    Close
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ASPECT Workshop in Vigo

Design, use and adoption of standardsVigo, Spain - From 14/12/2009 to 14/12/2009

The ASPECT Best Practice Network is organizing a regional workshop in Spain next December 14. This workshop is being held in conjunction with the first conference "Fomento e Innovación con Nuevas Tecnologías en la Docencia de la Ingeniería".

The main topics of the conference are related with the learning technology standards and specifications (LTSS):

  • Research in the LTSS context
  • Application of LTSS
  • Reuse of learning contents
  • Interoperability between heterogeneous systems
  • LTSS tends
  • Relevance of LTSS
Workshop Web site (in Spanish)

SE@M 2009 The 3rd international workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials

Making content standards work for you!Hotel Benczúr, Budapest - From 04/11/2009 to 05/11/2009

CONTEXT
--------------
Creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. The community working in the field of learning technologies has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge. Nowadays, the number of reusable educational resources available online, for free or by subscription, is huge but most of these resources are “hidden” in repositories and cannot be easily found, hampering their potential use and reuse.

Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have started to address these issues. Several initiatives worldwide (such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange, ARIADNE, and GLOBE) are developing solutions for federating e-learning systems and unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories. Started last year, the work of the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting these initiatives by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and retrieval of distributed learning resources.

The main goals of the international workshop on search and exchange of e-learning materials are to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the field of learning resource retrieval, facilitate the exchange between them and foster future collaborations. It aims at offering a forum where these researchers and practitioners can discuss theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and share the latest advances in the state of the art and practices for discovering and exchanging learning content.

One day of the workshop will be especially aimed at publishers and professionals with the objective to understand how existing and emerging standards can best be applied and combined to improve content interoperability and how to test the compliance of contents against a range of standards. A special focus will be put on the latest outcomes of the ASPECT partnership (http://aspect-project.org).

NB: this workshop is part of a series of workshops that are run by the ASPECT partnership. If you cannot attend SE@M 2009,  but you would like to receive updates on future workshops, plugfests etc., please register on the ASPECT website: http://aspect-project.org.

PARTICIPANTS
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SE@M 2009, aims at bringing together researchers and professionals working with learning resources publication and delivery —publishers of learning resources and technologies, managers of learning infrastructures and learning resource repositories, learning professionals and practitioners.

CALENDAR
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Call for contributions deadline: 20 OCTOBER, 2009

  • Extended abstract submission: 15 October, 2009
  • Notification of acceptance to presenters: 20 October, 2009
  • Workshop date: 4-5 November 2009
  • Camera ready revised abstracts: 15 November 2009

TOPICS OF INTEREST (include but are not limited to)
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Interoperable Content
  • Interoperable content format: Limitations of current standards, new developments
  • Conformance testing, quality control and validation
  • Tools
  • New developments
  • Profiling, validation and conformance testing
  • Controlled vocabularies and their management
  • Automatic metadata generation
  • Automatic metadata translation
  • Learning object identity

Infrastructures For Learning Resource Discovery And Exchange
  • Architectures for content discovery and exchange
  • Interoperable content and metadata repositories
  • Protocols for exposing content
  • Federations of learning resources
  • Service registries

Rich Description of Resources
  • Metadata
  • Standards and application profiles
  • Automatic metadata generation versus human indexing
  • Intellectual property and metadata
  • Controlled vocabularies and their management
  • Mapping and crosswalks between metadata standards
  • Metadata profiling and conformance testing

Discovering Content
  • User profiling for more accurate resource discovery
  • Retrieval of learning resources (searching, browsing)
  • Content aggregation
  • Interoperable query languages
  • Harvesting versus federated searching
  • Enhanced search mechanism (sorting, ranking)
  • Inclusion of other type of content (library, cultural heritage)
  • Recommendation systems
  • Quality aspects

Exchanging Content
  • Resource identification
  • Open content and reusable resource licensing
  • Reliable auditing (tracking, reporting)
  • Access control, licensing and content protection
  • WEB-2.0 approaches (e.g., folksonomies, content syndication)
  • Semantic web approaches

SUBMISSION
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Authors are invited to submit extended abstract (2 to 4 pages) of original unpublished research or work-in-progress. All submitted abstracts will be peer-reviewed by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality.

All extended abstracts should be submitted via the workshop's Web site at easychair:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sem09

Accepted submissions will be published online as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN 1613-0073.

Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs). For camera-ready format instructions, please see “For Authors“ instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

Questions can be addressed to: seam@eun.org

ORGANISERS
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David Massart, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
Serge Ravet, EIfEL, France

The workshops is organised by the ASPECT initiative

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)
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  • Vladimir Batagelj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • Jean-Noël Colin, FUNDP, Belgium
  • Ingo Dahn, Koblenz University, Germany
  • Erik Duval, KUL, Belgium
  • Manuel Kolp, UCL, Belgium
  • Joris Klerkx, KUL, Belgium
  • Robert Kristofl, BMUKK, Austria
  • Eugenijus Kurilovas, SMM, Lithuania
  • Tien-Dung Le, European Schoolnet, Belgium
  • Jon Mason, InterCog, Australia
  • Fredrik Paulsson, Umeå University, Sweden
  • Tomasz Orzechowski, AGH, Poland
  • Alain Pirotte, UCL, Belgium
  • Daniel Rehak, Learning Systems Architecture Lab and Daniel Rehak Consulting LLC, USA
  • Jan Pawlowski, JYU, Finland
  • Griff Richards, SFU, Canada
  • Bernd Simon, WU-Wien, Austria
  • Stefaan Ternier, Open Universiteit, The Netherlands
  • Tsuneo Yamada, Open University, Japan



ASPECT Web site

ASPECT Meeting

3rd Consortium meeting of the ASPECT projectBudapest, Hungary - From 21/09/2009 to 23/09/2009

Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content
Budapest, 21-23 September 2009

In September 2009 ASPECT partners will hold the following meetings:

* ASPECT Project Management Committee Meeting - Afternoon of 21st September 2009
* ASPECT Consortium Meeting - from 22-23 September 2009

The event will be hosted by EDUCATIO in Budapest at Kempelen Farkas Student Information and Resource Centre.more information

ASPECT Meeting in Vigo

Project management committee meeting and Consortium MeetingVigo - From 04/03/2009 to 06/03/2009

ASPECT EContentPlus Project
The ASPECT eContentPlus project is pleased to invite:

- the management representative of each partner organization to the 1st Project Management Committee Meeting (PMC)– on Wednesday 04/03/09, from 14.30 to 18.00.
- all of the project partners to the 2nd Consortium Meeting of the ASPECT project. – The meeting will start at 9.30, Thursday 05/03/09 and will cloture on Friday 06/03/09 at 16.00.

VENUE:
University of Vigo
Campus Universitario As Lagoas-Marcosende
36310 Vigo, Spain
Building: ETSE Telecomunicación
Room: Sala de XuntasASPECT Meeting in Vigo

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