e-Learning Standards: what global governance model is needed? Guest Contribution from Mike Collett.

There are several business and intellectual property models for the development of standards and specifications for e-learning.

It may be free, or there may be a cost, sometimes a large one, to:

• participate in the decision making;
• obtain documents and to re-use them.

Active organisations include ADL, AICC, ARIADNE, CEN/ISSS WS-LT, DCMI, IEEE LTSC, IMS, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 and SIFA. There are also lots of local and national standards organisations such as BSIIST43 in the UK.

Though they tend to share their love of acronyms, each has a different model, a different jurisdiction and a different level of international involvement or uptake. They are competing, sometimes aggressively, in an overcrowded and confusing  standards and specifications "market".

How can these models co-exist and the organisations work together?

London Conference

A free conference is taking place in London, UK on March 19th to consider some of these issues. In particular it will consider the governance or stewardship of SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), as it is transitioned from its creators to its new international steward.

Be part of the debate – submit a paper for the proceedings (by 16th February), offer to help or just register to come along.

Mike Collett - mike [AT] schemeta.com - is a director of Schemeta and is Chair of BSI's IST/043 Committee.

Comments

[Donald Clark]

This area of the industry is way, way out of control. Sure SCORM and accessibility were useful, although over-engineered. The real mistake is straying into design and pedagogic areas. The last thing we need are standards in this area.

We get the usual RLO nonsense (the lego brick analogy) and that's all it is, an analogy. The technology is shaping the learning landscape with Youtube, blogs, wikis, mobiles etc. The last thing we need are half-baked theories, based on half-baked science from standards 'experts' on what we should call 'learning'.

Back-off guys. At best you'll be ignored, at worst you'll be wasting millions in public money. Enough is enough.