LETSI Tech Wg, March 18 2008
Attending: Tyde Richards, Valerie Smothers, Neil Cramer, John Irving, Frank Polster, Wayne Gafford, Tom Watson, Ginny Travers, Jill Abbott
Avron, Robby, and Schawn are traveling back from Korea.
1. Roll Call
2. Review/Approve Agenda
3. Review/Approve 20080219 WG Minutes
4. General LETSI news
5. Korea Update
6. WG infrastructure (wiki, email reflector)
7. Day/Time Next Meeting
8. Adjourn
General News
Wayne gave an update on interest in S1000D. He's trying to establish an a collaboration between interested organizations to develop an S1000D profile of SCORM. He's started to articulate use cases. He has presented LETSI to international S1000D group and they supportive. The nature of interoperability is their only concern because there are questions about how S1000D currently support this
Korea Update
During the past week three events that are relevant to LETSI have occurred in Korea.
There was a full day face-to-face LETSI meeting on March 13. This was followed by an Open Forum conference on March 14 associated with the SC36 meeting that followed. Finally there was a full day meeting on March 16 of the Core SCORM Study Group under the aegis of SC36 WG4.
The LETSI meeting on March 13 was a good, productive event. A number of LETSI sponsors attended. The meeting was open and SC36 participants from the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada also attended. The meeting began with a status update of where LETSI currently is and largely focused on coming to closure on the sponsor MOU, policies and procedures, and other issues related to becoming a viable organization. There was some discussion of funding models and also the IMS legal challenge\
In the WG telecon several questions were asked about the meeting. It was clarified that sponsorship is still open to interested organizations. It was also clarified that the funding discussions understood that contributor fees would not be enough to fully fund LETSI. ADL spends approximately 1 million dollars a year to fund SCORM and LETSI cannot approximate this through fees. LETSI could be organized as a bare bones organization that is funded by fees, with specific activities organized as projects that can proceed when they have attracted sufficient funding. Members of the SEC plan to be more proactive in soliciting contributions.
At the open forum event there was a subtext of unease between ADL/LETSI and IMS. The event was organized into an ADL track, largely featuring SCORM, and a electronic textbook track, which is where the IMS Common Cartridge was discussed. In the ADL track, Allyn Radford gave a good presentation on using DITA for structured content. Kyoshi presented a study on SCORM adoption in Japan that showed a lot of people still using SCORM 1.2. Outside the US in countries like Japan there is a lag in adoption caused by issues like document translation. There is a discrepancy between expectations and outcomes for SCORM. Only 50% were happy with it but Kiyoshi felt this was largely an artifact of SCORM 1.2 adoption and limitations. Diana from Adobe gave a presentation on pdf, which is an ISO standard. She suggested it might be another technology that could be investigated for aggregation and offered to make an technical person available to discuss this with the LETSI Tech WG. The WG agreed to pursue this and Tyde will contact Adobe.
Around 25 people attended the SC36 CORE SCORM STUDY GROUP meeting on March 16. Several new parties attended who had not been on preparatory telecons, including participants from China and Russia. Tyde was the event leader and recollects participants from the US, Norway, France, Tunisia, Canada, Germany, Korea, Japan, AICC, IEEE, ADL, IMS. The purpose was to evaluate the Core SCORM Proposal that ADL submitted to SC36 last August. The meeting reviewed the proposal and the outcome of three preparatory telecons. ADL proposed three problem areas to evaluated the proposal: document types and procedures; content aggregation; candidate standards to add new capabilities. IMS proposed four additional problem areas, including the constraint on not including specifications, the interoperability implications of supporting multiple profiles, and the capabilities that should be included in Core SCORM.
There was discussion of the meaning of the issue raised by IMS regarding profiling by multiple communities of practice having a negative impact on interoperability. Tyde comment that he believed this concern primarily applied to vendors who did not want to tailor their products for different communities. The point was made that there is limited need to support exchange content between significantly different communities, such as the air force and K12.
There was discussion on the content aggregation issue, and the ADL position that in the future there appears to be a need to support multiple content aggregation formats for special purposes, such as S1000D for technical data. In the meeting Tyde presented the ADL position statements on MPEG 21.2 by Bill Blackmon and on S1000D by Wayne Gafford. IMS strongly believes that IMS CP 1.2 should become the single or preferred solution due to the current adopter base of IMS CP 1.1.4 Frank commented on the statement that Adobe was interested in investigation the possible use of the ISO pdf standard for this. This goes back to the learning functionality framework, last version drafted by Clark. Frank also commented that it helps to remember in this discussion of possible alternative aggregation formats for SCORM that the intended adoption point is 2-5 years in the future.
The Core SCORM Study Group agreed to investigate the 7 proposed areas. Participants volunteered to work on each of the areas and each of these teams will prepare a statement of their findings by early July. At that point a face-to-face meeting will occur in Canada to consolidate the information and a final report will be presented at the September SC36 plenary.
In the Study Group meeting there was strong support form several parties for adding accessibility to SCORM using the new SC36 access for all standard. Andy Heath from the UK national body offered to assist in explaining how the standard could be applied to SCORM. In the LETSI Tech telecon Jill asked about obtaining the document in question and Tyde agreed to try to obtain them.
Several people from China attended the meeting. From their perspective, SCORM is used primarily for corporate training. The people at the meeting represented higher ed, and in their use cases they do not need tracking data. They are primarily interested in instructor led training which they feel can be addressed by content packaging and LOM.
A new partnership agreement between the IEEE and ISO was presented and discussed with great interest. It enables IEEE standards to be fast tracked as ISO standards and tighter collaboration between the organizations. The IEEE standards used in SCORM can no be directly fast-tracked as ISO standards. Maybe the IEEE LTSC is the place where the bulk of SCORM standardization should be done because that is where the work has historically been done, where the majority of the standards used in SCORM are, and the process is more expedient that the SC36 process.
The question arose in the LETSI Tech WG about what the WG is doing to address new participation. There are technologies that may or may not be in our purview. Wayne mentioned two. HLA architecture is one. KGO networks produces a technology that compresses, chunks, and applies metadata to video. Both technologies may be applicable to SCORM.
Tyde suggested the learning functionality framework/roadmap could provide a means to make these technologies visible to the LETSI community. HLA is a mature, deployed technology. SCORM integration is not clear and interest may be specific to the DoD and high-end distributed simulation requirements. The learning functionality framework needs to notate what is in SCORM now, potentially in SCORM in the future, and what other technologies exist that may be relevant.
Ginny asked about next steps for the proposal to add a Web service annex to the five year update of the IEEE API standard. A plan needs to be put together quickly so that IEEE LTSC can authorize pursuing this at their upcoming April meeting. Assuming this moves forward a team needs to be assembled to do the work. Schawn had mentioned he would get ADL TWG members to review the document. An editor like Scott Lewis from ADL will be needed. Tyde will work with the concerned parties to put together a plan.
