e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Access For All

  • Open University in the UK, 40 Years After First Graduation

    There’s an interesting three-minute video produced by the BBC that covers the Open University at 40. It was a ground-breaking idea, and to date over 1.8 million students have obtained degrees. The current educational technology boom and interest in online education, including the MOOC phenomenon, owes a great deal to the Open University.

    As it’s too hot today to do much yard work, I might as well add transcription.

    Corduroy and calculus, kipper ties and chemistry.

    The Open University was a curious, groundbreaking mix. Forty years ago, in June 1973, its first graduation ceremony took place. Frederick Lavendar is now 87 years old [was part of first graduating class].

    Lavendar: “It was challenging, but it was exciting, too. Because everyone was in the excitement together.”

    The Open University was a radical concept. No qualifications required, no student campus, learning materials sent through the post, lectures broadcast on the BBC2.

    Professor Craig Mahoney: “The Open University provided access for students who didn’t typically have access to higher education at that time. Distance education was seen very skeptically, and people weren’t very supportive of that. So there was a big challenge.”

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  • Lots of News in the IMS Standards World

    Update: Scott Wilson rightly pointed out to me that the IMS produces specifications, not standards.

    This week was the annual IMS Learning Impact conference, and it brought with it a slew of announcements about progress on education-specific technical standards:

    • Learning Information Services v2.0 Public Draft Released: Well, this took waaay longer than expected, but the full draft is now ready for public review. I have written about this standard a few times before. Basically, it fixes many of the current problems with SIS/LMS integration and provides a more general means of provisioning class roster information into any application that needs it. LIS makes it easier for schools to move to support multiple LMSs, move to a different LMS, or make it easier for faculty and students to use non-LMS collaboration tools for classes. Expect more announcements about increased adoption of the standard in the coming months.
    • Basic Learning Tool Interoperability Finalized: This is a standard for proxying learning tools into your LMS/portal/PLE/whatever-unified-learning-environment-you-please. Think of Basic LTI as a lightweight, cross-platform answer to Blackboard Building Blocks/WebCT PowerLinks/Moodle Modules/whatever. Full LTI, which supports more complex use cases at the cost of a more complex implementation, is in the works.
    • Access For All 2.0 Finalized: AFA is an accessibility standard that has actually been around since 2003. However, it has since been submitted and adopted as an ISO standard and was modified significantly in the process. AFA 2.0 harmonizes the IMS standard with the ISO version of the standard.
    • Common Cartridge Adopted by Textbook Publishers to Support Tennessee Board of Regents: This is pretty big news. Standards generally don’t get traction unless customers demand that they be supported by their vendors. In this case, the Tennessee Board of Regents told the various textbook publishers that they expected course content for the high-enrollment general education requirements courses to be published in Common Cartridge format. Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, means the end of platform-specific course cartridges. It also potentially means that faculty migrating their courses from one system to another, either because they change schools or because their schools are changing LMSs, will have a much easier time of it. This latter bit will only happen if and when LMS platforms support Common Cartridge export, so be sure yo demand this from your vendor or your open source community.