Attending
Tyde Richards, Frank Polster, Don Holmes, John Campbell, James Xu, Fred Banks, Schawn Thropp, Tom Wason, Wayne Gafford, Jill Abbott
Approvals
Today's agenda and minutes from last meeting were approved
SCORM 2.0 Project
So far, 68 white papers have been recieved, plus a dozen "informal comments", and they are still coming in. Many of the papers address things that should be fixed in SCORM 2004, and others deal with new functionality or implementation alternatives. We need to decide if SCORM 2.0 is going to build on the base of SCORM 2004 or be a major departure. What is the market interested in?
Schawn pointed out that several topics have not yet been addressed by the white papers:
1. Digital Rights Management
2. Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Wes Regian - CTC and Dr. Xu - Memphis Co-Lab are talking and will be submitting something)
3. Accessibility
4. Content Service Architecture (Fred was going to talk to Ed Cohen about submitting something)
5. Competency (Avron is working this with Claude's wife to submit some of his work, and maybe have LETSI become the permanent home for Claude's website)
6. Learner Profiles (eportfolio, LIP, PAPI, data portability) - Robby looks like he submitted something, and I have a small paper started related to an I/ITSEC paper also which I hope to submit
7. Learning Styles
We discussed the failure of SCORM 2004 to attract tool vendors that would hide the complexity of sequencing, for instance, from course designers. On way the SCORM 2.0 work could address this, is to build an open source software community around SCORM, including common routines that would make tool-building easier for everyone.
The SCORM 2.0 Workshop in Pensacola (October 15-17) is already 60% booked to capacity. Including the workshop participants, LETSI how has about 40 individual members.
TRWG members are invited to review white papers of interest. (See letsi.org/scorm2.) We want to add lables (tags) to the white papers to help organize the material. Avron suggested we need a Label Czar to enforce semantics. He will bring this up with the Program Committee.
General LETSI news
There will be an impromptu Open Discussion about LETSI and SCORM 2.0 on Monday, August 25th, and 6:00pm Eastern. Those attending the ADL's implementation Fest can meet in the Spring Lake Room at the Regal Sun Resort. Remote participation is available at the usual Skype phone number, +9900827046972702. We'll use Eduworks Acrobat Connect account, http://eduworks.na3.acrobat.com/discuss. <http://eduworks.na3.acrobat.com/discuss> While SCORM 2.0 will be discussed, this is not a decision-making meeting, mostly becasue it is a very ADL-specific venue. Discussion notes will be posted.
Avron will be on a panel at DECOM 2008 with Rob Abel discussion the impact of standards on the development of marketplaces for digital educational content. LETSI is also participating in the Open Forum at the SC36 meeting in Stuttgart in September, in Masie's Learning 2008 event in October, and in the eLearning Guild's Learning 2008 event in November.
Schawn and/or Angelo will participate at the AICC meeting. Wayne will be presenting about Performance SCORM.
The 4-Box Model
There is confusion about what constitutes a standards body. ISO/IEC and IEEE are standards bodies. OASIS, W3C, IMS and AICC are trade associations. Some trade associations develop open standards, some don't. Some important standards come from trade associations, e.g. internet protocols from the W3C.
Tyde proposes changing the 4-Box model so that ISO standards are replaced by "Accredited Standards", which would include IEEE standards.
Should LETSI develop specs, or just integrate specs developed by trade associations and standards bodies?
How to we fix our efforts on open software standards?
We define the process anew, reflecting modern software practices and the realities of the LET world. Perhaps defining "maturity levels" for the specs in SCORM 2.0 and the way to move to more mature levels.
Infrastructure Issues
none
Next meeting
Tuesday, September 2 13:00 UTC
