Abstract
Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) are often described as “any place, any time” environments for learning. In order for such environments to become feasible and popular on a large scale, they must be based on a public market architecture that is distributed, component-based, non-proprietary, and standardized. This paper describes one such framework, and discusses its possible implementation using a set of standards developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. In addition, we comment on the central role that XML plays in the implementation of such standards.
Highlights
Since the introduction of personal computers in the early 1980’s, instructors and authors worldwide have developed numerous instructional materials in digital form
Scattered subsets of the global inventory of instructional materials are inter-connected through hypertext links, but the connections are crude and devoid of semantic information
The situation is much worse when it comes to combining materials that come from multiple sources; as Ritter and Suther comment: “it is currently impossible to assemble an Algebra lecture by integrating equation-solving software, graphing skills, and word problems developed by different authors” [3]
Summary
Since the introduction of personal computers in the early 1980’s, instructors and authors worldwide have developed numerous instructional materials in digital form. The building blocks are out there, in vast numbers and flavors, yet there is no systematic way to assemble them into reusable and inter-operable instructional structures To use another example, consider the course that I am presently developing together with Professor Noam Nisan at the Interdisciplinary Center The standard solution is to build a series of Web-based lecture modules, whose structure mimics the format in which the course is taught in the classroom This solution will be perfectly appropriate for the students in our course, yet it will completely ignore students in and out of IDC who could benefit from subsets of the course materials, if they knew how to find them. One goal of this paper is to give a user-oriented overview of some of the IMS standards, with the hope that other JALN readers will be sufficiently intrigued to experiment with this new and exciting resource
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