Attending

Tyde Richards, Don Holmes, Neil Cramer, Schawn Thropp, Jill Abbott, Fanny Klett, Robby Robson, Avron Barr

Approvals

Agenda approved.

No minutes were taken at last meeting (18 September). It was a small meeting due to participation in the SC36 meeting. No comments were received on the draft WG charter so it was approved as written.

WG Infrastructure

No new issues

Discussion of recent (SC36, AICC) and upcoming (ADL TWG, Learning 2007) events

ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 meeting in Toronto, 12-21 September 2007

Tyde, Robby, Fanny and Avron participated.

There was discussion in the plenary session about the status of fast-tracking SCORM as a technical report. Due to IP concerns with IMS that were unresolved at the time, ADL in August submitted just the SCORM runtime book for fast-tracking instead of the entire SCORM document set. The UK national body subsequently initiated the fast-track. The plenary group was okay with fast-tracking just the runtime book and, if needed, the issue can be revisited at the next SC36 plenary meeting in March 2008.

SC36 approved a Study Group activity to investigate possible strategies for SCORM standardization. The work will take place under the aegis of WG4 (Management and Delivery), which is convened by Canada. The Core SCORM proposal that ADL submitted to SC36 will be the basis of the activity. Participation is open to WG4 members and Tyde will lead the activity. WG4 membership includes many relevant parties including Japan (Kiyoshi), Australia (Jon Mason), Korea, the UK. Fanny and Robby will participate through the IEEE LTSC. SC36 has some current or upcoming standards that they are likely to want to see considered for Core SCORM. These include Quality, Accessibility, and Metadata (MLR). The Study Group will work electronically, may have a face-to-face meeting in January, and will give a report/recommendation by the Korea SC36 meeting, March 2008.

AICC Meeting and half-day ADL/AICC Collaboration Workshop (St. Louis, 24-28 September 2007)

Tyde, Schawn, Neil, Tom King, Robby, and Paul Jesukiewicz participated.

In the main AICC meeting the topic that generated the most dicussion was Adobe's "end of life" decision on Authorware. This has been the dominant authoring tool in the aviation industry and also had significant use in corporate training generally. There is a huge volume of existing Authorware content, estimated at thousands of hours, and its future is uncertain.

The relevant issue for LETSI is that one of the solutions historically proposed for the "legacy content" problem is to develop a courseware interchange language that is independent of authoring tool. SCORM does not have a content model for SCO-level content but ADL has sponsored prototype research that successfully demonstrated that the Open Document Format, and ISO/IEC standard, could serve this purpose. Other formats, such as the OASIS DITA format, have also been proposed. A SCO content model is therefore a possible R&D activity on the SCORM Technical Roadmap.

In the ADL/AICC workshop on collaboration there was discussion of the unfortunate consequences of the divergence of ADL SCORM from AICC CMI, the specification on which SCORM was originally based. There was consensus that re-harmonization of CMI and SCORM would be of great benefit and that this might be enabled by a future SCORM release, such as the work anticipate through LETSI.

The AICC and ADL agreed to collaborate on three specific projects.

• The first project is to harmonize the AICC CMI and SCORM runtime data models. The SCORM data model is an IEEE LTSC standardized subset of the AICC CMI data model. The AICC would like support for the additional data elements they use. This project addresses the general requirement for a future version of SCORM to support extensions.

• The second project will consider mutual support for the Package Exchange Notification Services (PENS) specification. This specification was originally proposed by Tom King, then with Macromedia, to address the need of a content authoring tool to inform learning and content management systems that content was ready for deployment. It has been developed by the AICC as a specification, is considered mature, and possible IEEE LTSC standardization has been discussed.

• The third project will address a Content Services Architecture (CSA), a service-based approach for distributed content that communicates information, such as the SCORM runtime data model. This builds upon the original AICC work with the http-based HACP protocol found in AICC CMI but not in SCORM, on subsequent AICC projects, and on vendor technology contributions. The ADL TWG has discussed doing something similar for several years.

A possible LETSI role for the second and third projects is to provide feedback from a adopter communities of practice to help assess if these solutions are broadly applicable, or could easily become broadly applicable by addressing some additional requirements.

ADL's SCORM TWG Meeting (Alexandria, 15-17 October 2007)

An important two-day meeting is planned. The first half-day will focus on maintenance fixes to SCORM 2004. The second day will review all proposals for additions/extensions to SCORM and the needs of the various communities of practice, who will all be represented along with the key SCORM vendors. Wednesday morning's session will focus on producing a work plan for various projects (sequencing, content aggregation, enterprise software architecture, etc.), including where the work will be done and coordination through LETSI.

Those LETSI Tech Roadmap WG members who can participate in this event are encouraged to do so and there will not be a WG telecon on October 16th.

There will be some provision for remote/dial-in participation to the TWG meeting but the conference service can only support a limited number of participants. If you plan to dial-in please contact Schawn Thropp as soon as possible: ThroppS@ctc.com.

Learning 2007

There will be a series of LETSI meetings on Sunday, October 21. The Technical Roadmap WG has a one-hour slot. What we do with our time will really depend on who attends the Sunday meeting. If a significant number of people attend who are new to LETSI it may make sense to give an overview presentation of technical roadmap issues. If a small number of people attend who represent particular communities of practice it may make sense to focus on gathering community of practice use cases and requirements.

Next meeting

The next WG telecon will be Tuesday, October 30 at 12:00 UTC