Under Construction

Attending

Jill Abbott
Avron Barr
Neil Cramer
John Campbell
Don Holmes
John Irving
Michael Pope
Tyde Richards
Schawn Thropp
Ginny Travers
Tom Wason

Approvals

Agenda approved with addition of ADL TWG Update
Minutes previous meeting approved

General LETSI News

A LETSI newsletter will go out this month.

A Business Requirements WG was approved by the SEC and it, in conjunction with the Teaching & Learning Strategies WG, are expected to collaborate with the Technical Roadmap WG to provide due diligence to the Technical Roadmap WG on, respectively, economic feasibility and learning relevance.

The ADL TWG will have a telecon later this week to discuss the features of a future edition of SCORM 2004. Concern was voiced about the impact to LETSI's Core SCORM project of potentially including new capabilities in this release, such as IMS Shared State Persistence. Concern was also voiced about the need for this type of capability for a DoD community of practice.

A question was raised about the next SCORM 2004 deltas being changes/corrections or additions, and also when the next opportunity would be to focus on genuine additions. In the LETSI context, the target date for the latter is 18-24 months.

A suggestion was made that this be looked at as a case study for a communities of practice, in this case DoD, adopting a capabilities that may in the future be more broadly adopted through Core SCORM. LETSI needs to articulate the steps/procedure to move capabilities from a single community of practice adopter to broader adoption.

A concern was raised about loop holes in current SCORM conformance testing that allow some vendors to claim conformance subverting the intent of conformance. A hope was expressed the focus on communities of practice in the future will allow more specific conformance testing, but also raised was the concern about the need for vendors to support multiple versions of conformance to accommodate those communities.

SC36 Core SCORM Study Group

The SC36 Core SCORM Study Group will have organizational telecons later this week, one each to accommodate Asia and Europe. The Study Group is open to national bodies and SC36 liaison organizations. 25 parties have signed up to participate. At present this activity needs to be led by ADL because LETSI has not yet established a liaison relationship with SC36. That is expected in the March 2008 timeframe. ADL will represent LETSI by proxy in the meanwhile.

Three projects will be proposed by ADL this week. Each of these assumes that LETSI will be the decision making party for future SCORM releases and one outcome of the Study Group will be to clarify this interaction.

The project areas are the general document types and procedures needed to support Core SCORM, a strategy to support content aggregation that evaluates MPEG 21.2, and a consideration of other de jure standards that may be included in Core SCORM.

Concern was voiced about identify missing desired capabilities for the future SCORM that may not yet be supported by de jure standards.

Concern was also voiced about the criteria for including de jure standards for evaluation, and the need for technical coherence between the capabilities that are eventually included within SCORM.

Concern was also voiced about the need for the Technical Roadmap WG to have access to any standards that are under consideration for inclusion SCORM (in some cases these are not published or free), and, more generally, about the desirability of standards used in Core SCORM being publicly and freely available.

Framework Document

A request was made for volunteers to work turning the draft framework table into a document. This will provide a way to notate capabilities that are under consideration for Core SCORM/SCORM 2.0 but also to capture capabilities that may initially be at the R&D stage or of interest to a specific community of practice. This document is intended to be shared with the SC36 Study Group to provide a means to document the de jure standards they identify for potential inclusion in Core SCORM.

The volunteers are:
Schawn
Avron
Jill
Ginny
Tyde

This group will plan to produce a purpose and scope statement and draft document outline for the next WG meeting.

Content Aggregation Workshop

There was discussion of the February 1, 2008 AICC workshop on Content Aggregation that will be a joint event with ADL and LETSI. The LETSI wiki page listing possible discussion topics was reviewed and interested WG members were asked to both post comments to the page and to contribute a one page position statement to the workshop.

A suggestion was made to matrix that on one axis listed the specifications under consideration for content aggregation and that on another axis listed the capabilities and properties (e.g. IP) of those specifications. The intent is to provide some way to contrast and compare options.

Some points were made that really should inform the framework discussion. First, it might make sense to consider aggregation as a component of an architecture that included other components such as metadata, sequencing, dynamic behavior. Second, that this approach needs to be informed by real world implementation concerns, not an assemblage of available standards. Third, the next SCORM release is intended to be a significant new release, and in our thinking it is good idea to "reach" for innovation.

Next Meeting

No bi-weekly meeting December 25 due to holliday
Next meeting Tuesday, January 8, 2008 13:00 UTC