Interoperability Standards for eLearning in Government initiatives - the Norwegian case Project Coordinator Tore Hoel, the eStandard project of Norway

Life and learning up in the cold north  The world’s best countries to live in: Denmark Sweden Norway Finland.. Italy (Source: UN survey, Uni of Pennsylvania)  Educational level being one of the salient factors contributing to the high ranking of the Nordic countries

Schools are soon ready for e-learning  Well equipped – especially secondary level  Last 3 years: 40 € spent on every child 0 – 18 years of age to stimulate ICT in education  Broadband access to Internet from home DaFiSeUK No Internet-computers per 100 students

Ubiquity of LMS in Norwegian learning  All universities are now rolling out LMS to all their students  Schools are following up – the municipalities are signing contracts with the Norwegian LMS vendors  Two major Norwegian vendors sharing the market

Are we ready for standardization? Standardization of e-learning technology is a complex negotiation of meaning and interests within large actor-networks of strong individual intellectuals, companies, users and user organizations, software vendors, international bodies, system architectures, message definitions, individual data elements and specifications - comprising both human and nonhuman actors.

Stakeholders in standardization  Governmental authorities  Educational communities  Vendors  Publishing houses  Content developers  Individuals All have different agendas and strategies for learning and teaching

Authorities Mediating negotiation Vendors Teachers Universities Schools Learners Content providers We need a body that is neutral, respected by everyone, and able to facilitate the negotiations between the stakeholders

The eStandard project of Norway  Awareness raising - not research  Part of National Learning Network initiative (covering lifelong learning, e.g. all education)  Convey international best practice  Participate in international standardization bodies  Give advice to Norwegian projects

The need for a metadata profile  Utdanning.no – a learning & teaching metaportal to learning resources, opened this year  Norwegian Schoolnet – use metadata (Dublin Core), but no strategy for distribution of metadata  LMS vendors – prepared for LOM, but nobody are tagging their resources  Publishing houses – waiting for digital rights technology

Nor-LOM Core  IEEE LOM – the solution to metadata?  We need a way to assign static metadata now, i.e. LOM  LOM has no value without a national profile  A small or a large LOM Core?  Vocabularies are the challenge  What about identifiers?

Nor-LOM Core ver by Dec. 15th  Open discussion – a challenge to the “governmental logic” “Too fast for us” “Who are making the decisions?”  Aschehoug publishing house contributed their metadata scheme  The vendors will take our advice  The L&T-portal will set the standard for exchange format for learning resources

Codebash – vendors testing interoperability  Two major vendors participated in CETIS’ CodeBash in June  Norwegian event in October  Standards do have practical implications when technology don’t function!

On the agenda  Specification for Course Description Metadata (first draft Oct. 2003)  Learning Object Repositories One or many repositories Metadata repositories  Federated Access and Identity Management  LOM and TopicMaps  Digital rights management – licence schemes, e.g. Creative Commons

Denmark  Recommendation for standards and national exchange platform due December 2003  More closed process owned by the Ministry, run by a consultancy firm with representatives from education, publishing, vendors, libraries etc.  Danish LOM profile  Focus on Digital Rights Management as part of the profile

Sweden  Plans for “soft infrastructure” recommendations  No work on profiles yet  The Ministry of Education and their bodies are putting out brochures which deal with standardization of e-learning in general - to make some sense of the eStandard alphabet soup  E-learning standards seems to be like SCORM (which is not the case! SCORM is one profile – among others…)