There is a great discussion about SCORM, IMS Learning Design, and Simple Sequencing going on between Mark Norton, Colin Smythe, Crispin Weston, and others talking about orchestrating dynamic content within a course. I think that dynamic pathing in content is a critical need where interoperability would be really great. [In my humble opinion: the current specs in the area (SCORM, IMS LD, IMS Simple Sequencing, etc) are all flawed and not responsive to the needs of teachers and learners.]
If you are interested in this topic you are welcome to watch or join in:
http://www.imsglobal.org/community/forum/index.cfm?forumid=11.
Here is my most recent post (a reply to Crispin Weston):
Crispin, with my Sakai/LMS architect hat on, I am very attracted to a declarative approach with pre and post conditions. I like this approach because I think that it is easier to implement and easier to get started to add “dynamic aspects” to an LMS that otherwise has no dynamic features at all (i.e. a very resource-oriented style LMS like Sakai).
While I am not an expert in Angel – I have played with it a bit and like it a lot – it seems to take a view that is a hierarchy of learning objects with pre and post conditions – and while I have not used pre/post conditions – the Angel UI appeals to me.
With my faculty member hat on – I like simple declarative pre and post conditions because I have the feeling that I can start out, author my class with no “design” as a hierarchy of learning objects – then after the initial pass through the material in a semester where stuff is slowly built up/revealed to the students over time (which is a nice pedagogy as it attracts attention to the stuff that is relevant now) – and then in the next semester I am teaching the same course – I already have the material – but I don’t want to dump it all on the students in day one – and some of it I want to hide until I clean it up a bit. All of a sudden my greatest need *as a faculty member* is some simple workflow to add to an existing structure. This way, we give faculty the tools to do simple dynamic pathing in their content.
I understand that pre/post is not “Sequencing with a capital S” – but my feeling is that “complex sequencing” (i.e. my course is a flow chart with 2000 boxes) is something that instructional designers love and faculty generally find uninteresting. I as a faculty member do not see my course and my teaching as “procedural”. I do not want to add a bunch of “GOTO” statements to my course. I see my course as more of a flow of data with fliters turning on and off bits and pieces. In short, my course is more like SQL than FORTRAN – and whenever I see complex sequencing – it makes me think of FORTRAN and computed GOTOs.
With my IMS hat on (third hat now) – I think that a simple spec that captures a language and namespace for pre and post conditions and associates them with pieces of the organization is a real winner. If QTIv1.2 has a good starting point – then that sounds cool to me – I would want to take a fresh look at it to make sure that it is truly *simple* and implementable. I would also look at Angel’s feature set to see if we can take some inspiration from Angel’s triggers.
Overall, I think that we could define and find some low-hanging fruit and come up with something pretty quickly that could find its way into shipping products pretty quickly. My current goal/measure/mantra is “what will make it into shipping products and into the hands of teachers and learners as quickly as possible”.
http://www.imsglobal.org/community/forum/index.cfm?forumid=11.