e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: IMS Common Cartridge

  • When It Comes to Content, Say “Yes” to Wrappers But “No” to Containers

    Scott Leslie has a good post up ruminating on the moving target of open textbooks which reminded me that I have long intended to write a follow-up to an exchange that he, I, and Rob Abel had in the comments section of a post a I wrote a while back. Scott lamented that the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges was releasing its open course content in IMS Common Cartridge format, which seemed to him to be not so easily accessible or universally usable as one might like. I wrote in response,

    Fundamentally, I don’t believe in cartridges. I don’t believe in forking a copy of a digital resource and stuffing it into another system. It’s bad for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to the implementation challenges that Scott ran into with Moodle (although it’s fair to say that some LMSs handle CC import better than others). Common Cartridge made more sense 5 or 10 years ago, but it’s late to the game and is ultimately destined to be eclipsed by in-place APIs, including but not limited to IMS LTI. (By the way, I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea to let Google own our integration API either.)

    Unsurprisingly, Rob Abel, as CEO of the IMS, took issue:

    If there is agreement that CC helps with the issue of content in an LMS then, well in your scenario the content is inside the publisher “LMS” (or equivalent).

    Can I tailor it? Can I put things in there – like a syllabus – and get it out? If I’m the student and I create something in there can I get it out? Can I mix and match with other publisher materials? Can I archive that mixing for next term? Can I share what I did with my faculty peers who might want to learn from it? Can I create assessments in there and then use them somewhere else or just put them somewhere so that I can use them in the future?

    Common Cartridge – or something like it – helps solve those issues. Fits right into the topic of openness. But, most importantly, in the digital education age we need to make digital education easy for the faculty and the students. Otherwise there won’t be a digital education age :-)

    Perhaps a mixture of OER and publisher proprietary stuff might be a solution. IMHO, some stuff needs to be tailored, remixed, moved in, and moved out. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a publisher platform or an LMS. Faculty want their stuff. Students want their stuff. Publishers need to help them, not thwart them.

    I said that the binary choice Rob was offering up wasn’t the right one and promised to elaborate in a future post. Here, at last, is that response.

    (more…)

  • Openness: The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating

    In my last post, I said that I thought Blackboard’s announcement of making it easy to add a Creative Commons license to a Common Cartridge export is significant. One day later, we have some evidence of just how significant. e-Literate featured blogger Audrey Watters has a post up on her own blog about a big announcement out of Washington state:

    With help from matching funds from the Gates Foundation, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges has built a Open Course Library (OCL), which launches today. The idea behind the library is to address the increasing cost of textbooks by making openly licensed course materials available for 81 of the state’s most enrolled classes. Some of the materials in the OCL are free, but some aren’t. The only stipulation: no required material or textbook can cost a student more than $30.

    The first phase of the project, which is available today, features materials for 42 of these classes, including Introduction to Literature, Introduction to Chemistry, Calculus I, and Microeconomics. (The other 39 should come online in the Spring of 2013)….

    As the materials in the OCL are licensed CC-BY, instructors will be able to adopt the course modules or adapt the materials to suit their own classes’ needs. The materials are available via Google Docs and Google Sites so that they can be shared between faculty and institutions, but there are also options to import the content into standard LMSes.

    By “options to import the content into standard LMSes,” she means that the content will be available as IMS Common Cartridges. How are they being produced? It turns out that the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges has a state-wide license for ANGEL, which happens to export to Common Cartridge. So this initiative, which could turn out to be a big deal in terms of community college affordability, is partly enabled by a for-profit LMS vendor’s decision implement Common Cartridge export. Who was the guy in charge at ANGEL at the time that technology decision was made? Ray Henderson, the same guy who announced Common Cartridge export for Blackboard.

    By the way, there’s plenty of room for Pearson to play here too. Production of OERs is only part of the problem. You still need to drive adoption. If OpenClass made it very easy for faculty to find and import OCL content, either through Google Apps integration or through Common Cartridge import, that would be a significant step forward in at least one kind of Openness.