Introduction

Throughout this series, we have covered the different ways standards are created and agreed upon, the role of education-specific technical and metadata standards, and the use of repositories for scholarly communications and assessments. We considered recent additions and changes in the development and use of standards. Many issues influence the use of standards, including the role of informal, community-based development of standards — what can loosely be considered as the open agenda — and the impact of Web 2.0 tools.

This final article reviews and expands upon these trends and discusses the current tensions they create for those seeking to develop, implement, or use tools to support the management and use of educational content and systems outlined in earlier articles.

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The impact of informal community-based development on educational standards

The development of standards through informal community-based approaches stands in contrast to the development of standards by formal standards bodies or by organizations developing standards or specifications as part of their core business. We discussed the different communities of standards and specification development in detail in the first article of this series, to recap briefly:

• Official standards bodies operate nationally and internationally (for example ISO, International Organization for Standardization) and through extensive discussion and rigorous process ratify (and occasionally develop) standards. Once developed, such standards are formally recognized and are considered fixed and stable, and compliance with them may form part of the procurement requirements for public institutions.
• Some organizations and companies (for example, IMS Global Learning Consortium) create standards as their business. Members and invited experts develop and revise specifications or standards in a closed process. That is, while development is underway, the drafts are usually private documents. One may reference or use the final standards freely but must license any adaptation of the specification.

Both of the above forms of standards ratification and development involve thorough processes that often span a number of years.

However, a new trend towards using rapid projects that develop standards in a model patterned after agile development processes exists. A small team of interested people defines a problem or challenge and rapidly iterate draft standards. This community based development process is often compressed into a much shorter period. Although any given draft may contain significant problems, the process seeks to develop, make, and correct errors, and to achieve a workable standard that does most of what is required. This is in contrast to carefully working out the right standard through consensus in a large group of people and addressing every possible scenario.

Standards developed in this new way can be refined and developed further. An example of this type of development is the SWORD project (see Resources), which rapidly developed SWORD, a very simple profile of the Atom publishing protocol, to support a tightly defined problem: depositing metadata and scholarly articles into repositories. Developed by a small diverse group of repository programmers and experts it is widely used. A follow-on project is now returning to a related problem to develop the SWORD standard in a modular manner to support CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) functionality.

The process is often project-based and the team of people working on it may be either selected or self-selecting, and gather only for this particular short-term collaboration. Keep in mind that, although the coordination work may be funded to some degree, involvement in the process is often voluntary. The development groups often have no formal standards-related corporate existence. These groups, even if selective, frequently make their drafts publicly available as they go. So, although they don't necessarily have the structured public consultation process that more formal bodies do, their method of working allows them to gather some degree of comparable feedback.

Such community-based development may influence the wider development of educational standards as established standards. Development organizations will consider using more lightweight and rapid approaches to development, while balancing their need to achieve broader agreement and meet more complex scenarios and user requirements.

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The impact of Web 2.0 on educational standards

The range of online tools and services loosely referred to as Web 2.0 offer individuals and institutions a different approach to the provision of many of the software or functional requirements of education. The key features of these services include:

• They are provided online through a browser
• They are often free (at least for a basic service, which is often supported by advertisements)
• They frequently support the use of open licenses for content
• They often have an element of public sharing and social interaction built in (though there are often options to reduce or remove this public interaction or visibility)

Some examples of such tools are Flickr, Slideshare, Delicious, and YouTube. Related tools, which are perhaps not strictly Web 2.0 tools, include blogging services (such as Wordpress or Blogger) and web-based email (such as Hotmail or Gmail). We will consider some of the possible usage of these tools and the indirect impact they have on the role and design of educational technical standards.

In the first article in this series, we outlined some of the reasons why there are specific technical standards in education, and discussed how they might work in virtual learning environments (VLEs) and repositories. However, if we consider a classic virtual learning environment use case of a lecturer trying to share slides and resources with a cohort of students, we can observe that the use of Web 2.0 tools — perhaps Slideshare for slides and documents, and Flickr and YouTube for images or diagrams and videos — could duplicate most of the basic functions of the VLE. Students could post comments and responses through blogs or the comment facilities built into the tools.

In the above example using Web 2.0 tools, the tools and services, built by private enterprises, usually store completely custom data. Although some common fields may exist (title, author, license), few educational specific technical standards are used. The formats for information used by the Web 2.0 services may become de facto standards if the service is successful enough, but they aren't designed for education and don't explicitly store the types of information previously considered essential for educational description.

On first consideration this might suggest that using such tools in an educational context would work comparatively poorly; thus far, however, this does not appear to be the case. If we assume that in either approach (Web 2.0 or VLE) the content is initially shared with students through pointing them to a particular location, the primary function of the metadata is to support discovery and use of the materials by others outside of this cohort. In this circumstance, the current lack of ability to provide dedicated specific metadata or the need to distribute different types of interaction to different unconnected tools are offset by two key factors:

1. the ability for users to add comments and their own tags
2. ability for these comments, tags, and any full text of the content itself to be indexed by search engines

As a result, for other people looking for resources, search engine indexing can act in the place of specific metadata. It may not be able to provide as precise a search, but the question for users is usually, "Can it provide a good enough approximation?" given the cost savings, individual access and control, and potential interaction with a wider community that such tools offer.

The use of Web 2.0 tools in place of dedicated tools and services provided by the institution is contentious and is certainly not a settled question. There are a number of challenges and concerns:

• Educational content is made publicly visible. Institutions may be concerned that this would affect their competitiveness or may consider it inappropriate or dangerous to publish some materials.
• The use of the free versions of many of these services often requires students to see advertisements (even if they are only unobtrusive links). Though not necessarily different from the level of advertising one might be exposed to through regular Internet use, it may offer an ethical dilemma for some institutions.
• The use of such services may require that content is also licensed to the service providers. Though such a license is not often exploited by the service provider and may be needed to support some of the site functionality, institutions may have concerns about this.
• Web 2.0 services are global; consequently, there may be a need for an institution to consider the legality of their content in other jurisdictions (in particular with respect to copyright exemptions for educational use). The Web2Rights project offers a more detailed discussion of some of the legal issues institutions face when they use Web 2.0 tools (see Resources).
• Web 2.0 services may or may not conform to relevant disability discrimination legislation; however, institutions have no control over the services and may be able to do little to adjust them to accommodate individual needs.
• Such services are commercial companies and, although some degree of service level agreement may be possible, issues such as downtime and general reliability, changes in terms of service, or the collapse or takeover of a the service are outside institutional control. This introduces an element of risk.

A further difference between a Web 2.0-based approach and a VLE-based approach is that VLEs are designed to provide extensive data on student interaction with the system and content therein. In Web 2.0 tools, the data available to the teacher (as a user) about the student (as another equal user) will be of a different type and is likely to be more limited. For example, a VLE might tell a professor which students have read a resource, how much of it they read, and how long they spent reading it. Whereas a Web 2.0 service might mention that a resource had been visited.

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Open agenda

Several initiatives related to the concept of openness also relate to technical standards in education, including:

• Open source software
• Open standards
• Open access
• Open educational resources

Open source software does not in itself have a significant impact on educational technical standards, but a number of repository systems used widely in educational institutions are open source (including DSpace, ePrints and Fedora Commons), as are numerous small tools developed to provide reference implementations of standards (such as Reload). See the Resources section for links to these tools. Open source software is, however, highly influential on education in its role as a model for other forms of openness and has developed a number of relatively mature business models around freely available software.

The open access movement has led to the creation of standards (such as OAI-PMH) and software, including the repositories mentioned above and publishing software (such as Open Journal System) to support scholarly communication. Part 3 of this series, Open repositories in scholarly communication, discusses open access and repositories in more detail (see Resources).

Open standards

Although we mentioned the role of open standards let’s review in connection to the above context of community-based standards. Even if a standard or specification is available without cost, the developers typically retain full rights over the standard. As such, there may be restrictions on its redistribution, inclusion in other standards, adaptation, or further development without the explicit consent of the owner.

This isn't the place to attempt a proper definition of open standards and the Wikipedia page on open standards shows just how complex a task that is — listing at least 15 authoritative definitions. There are, however, a number of issues identified as problematic if standards creators seek to retain full rights. These include the inability to create derivative works — perhaps to enhance or profile standards for particular needs — and the potential inability for standards organizations to adopt specifications developed by others because of unclear rights issues across different legal jurisdictions. Further information about the role of open standards in innovation is available from the CETIS white paper, The Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education — System and Process (see Resources).

The Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives and standards

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation define Open Educational Resources (OER) as "high-quality, openly licensed educational materials that offer an extraordinary opportunity for people everywhere to share, use, and reuse knowledge. They also demonstrate great potential as a mechanism for instructional innovation as networks of teachers and learners share best practices" (see Resources). The term OER was coined at a UNESCO conference in 2000, drawing on earlier work in open source software, open access initiatives, and work by David Wiley on sharing educational content. The initiative benefited greatly from the development of Creative Commons licenses, which provided a clear and simple way to create content-related licenses that grant permission without needing to contact the owner.

Perhaps the most well known initiative sharing OER is MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). Founded in 2001, MIT OCW now shares content from 2000 courses (see Resources). The exact type of content shared varies by course: It might be readings and notes or it might be audio and video of lecture materials. OCW provides access to a wealth of materials and its content not only provides opportunities to learn but also provides other educators with resources to use in their own teaching as well as perspective on how they teach. One important fact about MIT OCW, as with most OER initiatives, is that it does not provide access to the MIT campus, academic faculty, study groups, assessment process, or accreditation, and doesn't (currently) provide community interaction features around the content.

In terms of educational standards, early institutional OER initiatives were developed using content management tools rather than VLEs or repository tools. Instead of focusing on technical interoperability, they often focused on ensuring that the content presented clearly to the end user; and that centralized processes checked the clearance of intellectual property rights. However, as the use of these systems has matured, there has been more use of educational technical standards and platforms. For example, The Open University in the United Kingdom is also a member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and its OER site OpenLearn (Resources) is based on Drupal and Moodle and provides OAI-PMH and RSS /Atom feeds for its content.

There is, though, another end of the OER spectrum — individuals sharing content. For a fuller non-technical discussion of this spectrum, see the blog entry, Big OER and Little OER (see Resources). If MIT and other members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (using content management systems, repositories, or VLEs) exemplify institutional release of OER, the individual end of the spectrum is typified by individual academics engaging in sharing their resources through Web 2.0 tools such as SlideShare and blogging platforms such as WordPress. These platforms don't support a lot of user-created metadata and, although tags and descriptive fields might allow for some educational description as free text, little formal educational metadata can be used and the RSS that is created for resources is fixed. Such individual initiatives succeed because the tools are search engine friendly and promote conversation and a social infrastructure around content that allows it to be disseminated by reputation.

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Debates and developments

The article so far has outlined a number of movements or challenges that are shaping the current use of educational technical standards. This section briefly revisits how some of these issues intersect and what the key questions are faced by educational community.

In part driven by community-based standards development, there is a trend in the development of standards and specifications to work in ways that are more lightweight and to develop standards more efficiently. This may simplify the development of educational standards but educational specific standards increasingly need to demonstrate the value that they add over standards that are more generic. They need to be used in contexts where they add value to the user (whether system manager, teacher or student) and meet user needs. Some standards such as QTI (for assessment items) clearly do this and have active development communities (see Resources).

The use of Web 2.0 tools to provide services for education introduces an element of risk and loss of control to institutional processes but in return offers relatively cheap, low maintenance, scalable tools. Some universities, such as Leeds Metropolitan University, have chosen to outsource their institutional email provision to online providers (in their case to Google). Few institutions plan to replace their VLEs with Web 2.0 services. Yet, such services influence the design of educational software, both to include comparable functionality expected by users, and to integrate ways to link institutional content to Web 2.0 services, for example, including Post to delicious or Tweet this buttons on a resource or web page. A challenge for educational standards is how the rich functionality they can support will fit with services designed to work with just a few creator-provided information elements.

The bigger challenge to institutions using educational standards as the default manner in which to store and share learning materials is seen in the use of Web 2.0 tools with OER initiatives and their relative sustainability. Some OER initiatives working at the institutional level are wondering how to meet their operating costs and be sustainable after project or grant funding has finished. Some are seeking to fund this work through charitable donations to release courses. Others are making a case to their institutions based on the marketing benefits of making their content available. Some have ceased releasing content. In this context, a coordinated approach to using Web 2.0 tools to manage learning content might prove to be a more sustainable mechanism for OER initiatives. With such an approach working for OER, an institution may choose to use such tools more widely and replace other parts of their learning environments.

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Emerging possibilities

There are a number of key areas being explored in relation to OER, including:

• Aggregation and discovery tools for OER
• Open textbooks
• Services to support, assess, or accredit OER-based learning
• Large scale participatory open education

Let's look at these areas in depth.

Aggregation and discovery tools for OER

Globally there has been significant investment in the release of OER through both direct funding for clearing intellectual property rights issues for learning materials, and through the establishment of organizations and tools to support those releasing OER. As these initiatives mature, there is an increasing need for coherent discovery services for the OERs released. Search engines may provide one approach, but specific services can provide a more precise group of resources to search. Initiatives in this area include DiscoverEd, OERCommons, OCW Search, GLOBE, and XPert (see Resources). One of the key challenges they face is how to discover and index OER released both by institutions using repositories and content management systems (perhaps generating OAI-PMH and Dublin Core metadata) and by individuals using Web 2.0 tools and blogs (perhaps generating RSS and a limited number of information elements).

Open textbooks

The increasing costs of student textbooks, which can pose a financial obstacle pose for students, is prompting new initiatives to develop open textbooks. These textbooks would be freely available to students online (or could be printed at cost) and could be adapted and updated by educators as often as needed. Such initiatives have received considerable backing in some states in the U.S. (for example, Washington and California). Currently, there is no one particular technical format for such textbooks; however, there are a number of web formats (such as HTML), ebook formats (such as epub), and document formats (Microsoft® DOC or Adobe Acrobat PDF, though PDF may restrict the adaptability of the content) that could be used.

Support services for open education

As outlined earlier, OER initiatives only provide materials openly. They don't offer things like study support or accreditation. This is, however, an area of active development and recently one service providing or coordinating study support for users of OER (OpenStudy.com) entered into partnership with MIT OCW to create study communities around some of their content (see Resources).

There are also initiatives looking at ways to acknowledge (if not at some point accredit) learning gained through open education. One approach fostered by a project funded by the Mozilla Foundation is to develop a specification for badges associated with study content (see Resources). Users could be awarded such badges once they'd finished a course or through demonstrating understanding of content, and these could become part of their online profile.

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Conclusion

This series on technical standards for education has, beginning with considering development process of standards, examined their use in the education sector. It has looked at key standards around content packaging, scholarly communications, metadata, assessment items, and has concluded by considering some of the emerging challenges and opportunities brought about by agile development methodology used in community-based standards, by the growing usefulness of Web 2.0 tools, and by trends in OER initiatives.

In my opinion, educational, technical standards in their own right no longer occupy a privileged position in the system and process of universities and colleges; they are replaceable (or at least able to be worked around) unless they can demonstrate the value they add and their implementation must be able to deliver that value. However, there has also never been a more interesting time to develop and work with standards in education as new requirements emerge and changes in lifestyle and the costs of education mean systems and standards have to respond to a demand for more flexible educational opportunities.

John Casey (Digitalinsite) and Gareth Waller (AGW Software) developed the original outlines for the series of articles.

Resources

Learn

• For a detailed discussion of some of the legal issues facing institutions when they use Web 2.0 tools, please see the Web2Rrights project.
  
  
• The wikipedia page on open standards lists at least 15 authoritative definitions of the term.
  
  
• Further information about the role of open standards in innovation is available from the CETIS white paper, The Future of Interoperability and Standards in Education — System and Process.
  
  
• Read about Open Educational Resources from the William and Flora Hewlet Foundation website.
  
  
• See David's Wiley's wiki on developing open educational resources.
  
  
• Creative Commons licenses provides a clear and simple way to create licenses which grant a variety of permissions relating to content without needing to contact the owner.
  
  
• Perhaps the most well-known initiative sharing OER is MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), which was founded in 2001.
  
  
• The Open University in the United Kingdom is also a member of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, and its OER site OpenLearn is based on Drupal and Moodle and provides OAI-PMH and RSS /Atom feeds for its content.
  
  
• See Martin Weller's blog entry, Big OER and Little OER, to learn more about individuals sharing educational content.
  
  
• OpenStudy is a social learning network where students ask questions, give help, and connect with other students studying the same things. Its mission is to make the world one large study group, regardless of school, location, or background.
  
  
• Learn about the OpenStudy partnership with MIT OCW.
  
  
• One initiative looking at a way to acknowledge learning gained through open education is a project funded by the Mozilla Foundation to develop a specification for badges associated with study content.
  
  
• EPrints is an open source repository platform.
  
  
• DSpace open source software enables open sharing of content that spans organizations, continents and time.
  
  
• Fedora is another major player in the open source repository platform space.
  
  
• DiscoverEd is a search prototype developed by Creative Commons to explore metadata enhanced search, specifically for OER.
  
  
• OER Commons provides open educational resources.
  
  
• OCW Search is a search engine dedicated to helping you find the best free university courses online.
  
  
• The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance was formed to make shared online learning resources available to educators and students around the world.
  
  
• The aim of the XPert project is to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use.
  
  
• This standard created by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative began through a workshop held in Dublin, Ohio has been incorporated in to other specifications and 'ratified as IETF RFC 5013, ANSI/NISO Standard Z39.85-2007, and ISO Standard 15836:2009' and remains a key basic set of descriptive metadata.
  
  
• The original Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is a fifteen element set of metadata terms intended to provide a basic minimal descriptive set that could be used for any type of resource but was directly intended for web pages and other digital resources; the terms included: Title, Date, Creator, Publisher, Rights, Language.
  
  
• The IMS Global Learning Consortium develops and licenses specifications as their core business (the specifications are free to consult but need to be licensed for use).
  
  
• In the education domain, many virtual learning environments (VLE) support IMS specifications such as Content Packaging or Question and Test Interoperability.
  
  
• In the wider web community initiatives such as OpenID and OAuth illustrate important community-developed standards.
  
  
• Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
  
  
• The SWORD project. SWORD received coordination and start up funding from JISC
  
  
• JISC provides infrastructure, guidance, and support for the use of technology in UK Higher and Further Education.
  
  
• The IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard
  
  
• The Common Cartridge specification was designed to provide a less complex and more tightly defined packaging standard to help content publishers ensure content displays uniformly and runs smoothly across any compliant system.
  
  
• IMS Global is developing Learning Tools Interoperability specification to support a standard interface between VLEs or Learning Management Systems and distributed web tools that they can use.
  
  
• The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a tightly defined collection of profiles of specifications and standards, originally designed to support e-learning in the US Department of Defende, but which is now much more widely implemented and used.
  
  
• The Open Archives Initiative has developed the Object Reuse and Exchange specification OAI-ORE to help describe and share aggregations of content distributed across the web.
  
  
• Open archival information system — Reference model. ISO 14721:2003 specifies a reference model for an open archival information system (OAIS). The purpose of this ISO 14721:2003 is to establish a system for archiving information, both digitalized and physical.
  
  
• Dublin Core metadata initiative is a commonly used standard for descriptive metadata.
  
  
• The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) provides an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting.
  
  
• Learn about the Simple Webservice Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD).
  
  
• "The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub)", RFC 5023, is an application-level protocol for publishing and editing web resources.
  
  
• The aim of the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world.
  
  
• Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
  
  
• Visit IBM developerWorks Industries for all the latest industry-specific technical resources for developers.
  
  
• To listen to interesting interviews and discussions for software developers, check out developerWorks podcasts.
  
  
• developerWorks technical events and webcasts: Stay current with developerWorks technical events and webcasts.
  
  

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About the author

R. John Robertson works for the Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS), one of the Innovation Support Centres funded by Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to: represent Further and Higher Education in the development of relevant standards and specifications, nurture relevant developer communities and innovation, and provide guidance and support for JISC development programmes. John currently supports JISC's work in Open Educational Resources. A librarian by training, his professional background is in development and support projects around the management of digital assets, repositories, digital libraries, and metadata.

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Table of contents

• Introduction
• The impact of informal community-based development on educational standards
• The impact of Web 2.0 on educational standards
• Open agenda
• Debates and developments
• Emerging possibilities
• Conclusion
• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

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