The meetings of the ISO Sub-Committee that is responsible for technical standardization of e-Learning technology (full name ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36, Information Technology for Learning, Education and Training) in Wellington New Zealand are currently winding up. In this posting, I try to summarize some interesting developments with a minimum of standards jargon!
- An important development or piece of news actually relates to something outside of ISO: this is that the future of SCORM, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model developed by the US Department of Defense, will remain with the Department of Defense, and will take the form of a radically new Web-services oriented model. It will be designed with a wide range of concerns and technological developments in mind, including integration with overarching organizational information systems.
- The IMS Content Packaging specification will become a freely-available ISO document. Content packaging is certainly one of the most widely-implemented standard in e-learning. This version will contain only minor changes, to make it consistent with ISO conventions and formatting.
- Learning Resource Metadata (LRM). The saga of metadata for learning resources (a.k.a. learning objects) continues. The standard that is gradually emerging from ISO on this front shows some very promising design features, including a core set of that is based on Dublin Core. Although it attempts to be neutral as far as implementation environments are concerned, the LRM standard is well-suited to RDF and OWL contexts that are part of the semantic Web.