Aviation Industry CBT
(Computer-Based Training) Committee (AICC) -
Beginning in the late 1980's, the
airline industry, long a user of distributed information systems for
training, developed a set of standards, including AICC
Guidelines & Recommendations (AGR's) for on-line course software courseware delivery standards.
Officially, the AICC develops guidelines for aviation industry in the
development, delivery, and evaluation of Computer-based
training (CBT) - though not necessarily WEB based
training in the airline industry.
AICC's guidelines are
divided into 9 recommendations (AGRs AICC guidelines and recommendations).
These following have no formal compliance testing available:
AGR-002 - COURSEWARE DELIVERY STATIONS
AGR-003 - DIGITAL AUDIO
AGR-004 - OPERATING/WINDOWING SYSTEM
AGR-005 - CBT PERIPHERAL DEVICES
AGR-007 - COURSEWARE INTERCHANGE
AGR-008 - DIGITAL VIDEO
AGR-009 - ICON STANDARDS: USER
INTERFACE
Two other AICC
recommendations (relating to CMI or Computer Managed Instruction) have
compliance tests available at
AICC's CMI Test Suite Page.
The use of AICC's
official terms to describe adherence is very obscure to the general public.
"AICC
compliant" is used to indicate that the vendor "self identifies"
that at least part of their product conforms to at least one of the AICC
specifications. "AICC Certified"
in theory indicates that the vendor has submitted the product to third party
verification of adherence and has been certified to
at least one AICC standard, but vendors' marketing reps tend not to use
"compliant" and "Certified" interchangeably. Check the AICC web site to be
sure.
Editor's Note: since
both IMS and ADL have embraced the AICC standards, a product that is AICC
Certified to AGR-010 - Web-based Computer Managed
Instruction is
mostly likely to preserve your content development investment into the
future. Interestingly, relatively few of the major software vendors
for web educational software are AICC Certified.
In practice, the AICC's AGRs are considered
pioneering, but not very functional, standards for
most of the computer-based training industry. In
recent years, the power of "AICC Certified" has been less influential
in elearning circles. AICC compliance, while limited in some
respects, represented a starting place for many elearning
vendors to focus on applying standardized
architecture to their products.
Instructional
Management System (IMS) Global Learning Consortium - originally an
Educause design initiative,
this group of academicians, vendors and a sprinkling of
corporate/government types is hashing out the written specifications
of on-line learning tools, including locating
and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner
performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems.
Originally, this group also attempted to sponsor a prototype product meeting
that design plan (from which the Blackboard product
line originated), but this deliverable seems to have fallen by the wayside
with the advent of ADL (below). IMS has two key goals:
- Defining the technical
specifications for interoperability of applications and services in
distributed learning, and
- Supporting the incorporation of the IMS specifications into products and services worldwide. IMS endeavors
to promote the widespread adoption of specifications that will allow
distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors to
work together (in technical parlance, "interoperate")
Advanced
Distributed Learning Network (ADL) -
Essentially, practical testbed for selected
deliverables of the IMS
initiative. In November 1997, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched the
Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative. ADL did not compete with
other standards efforts already
underway by the AICC, IMS, and IEEE. ADL sought to
provide a functional testbed for those efforts under one umbrella, and
in January 2000 it released the first version of an encyclopedic document
called the Sharable Course
Object Reference Model (SCORM). ADL's stated charter is to
- Develop guidelines needed for
large-scale development and implementation of efficient and effective
distributed learning
- Identify and promote business
models and economic incentives that serve the needs of both consumers
and providers of distributed learning
- Establish a rapidly growing
networked community of education and training consumers
- Stimulate large-scale collaborative
developments by organizations that share learning requirements
- Identify technical challenges that
exceed the current state-of-the-art, and initiate collaborative
research and development programs to overcome those challenges
- Share lessons learned and
accelerate the development of a robust, highly diverse object-oriented
open environment for Advanced Distributed Learning
To assure an "anchor
tenant" for ADL-compliant systems, The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is
backing ADL to establish a cost-effective distributed learning environment
that is consistent across the military services and all other DoD
components. DoD and other Federal agencies want to make use of
specifications representing best commercial practice.
However, it is likely that ADL's SCORM specifications accurately
foreshadow the IEEE standards, so private developers are watching the
SCORM standard carefully.
-
IEEE Standard for
Computer-Based Learning - IEEE is one of the world's largest Standards
Development Organizations (SDO) and is accredited by the American National Standards
Institute (ANSI).
-
Within IEEE, the Computer Society is sponsoring the
discussion of Learning Technology through
the IEEE Learning Technology Task
Force . The purpose of this task force is to contribute to the field of Learning
Technology and to serve the needs of professionals working in this field.
-
IEEE is also sponsoring the
eventual development of international software standards through the
IEEE
Learning Technologies Standards Committee, The mission of IEEE
LTSC working group is to develop Technical Standards, Recommended
Practices, and Guides for software components, tools, technologies and
design methods that facilitate the development, deployment,
maintenance and interoperation of computer implementations of
education and training components and systems. It appears that IEEE is accepting drafts from AICC, IMS
and ADL towards development of IEEE standards.
Making Sense of it: This author's
Quick and Dirty Summary of eLearning's Technical Standards process
-
AICC started it, breaking
ground for interoperability
-
IMS specs it, documenting
the issues in broad written specifications
-
ADL tests it, adapting IMS
specs with an eye toward concrete implementations
-
IEEE LTSC will standardize
it, likely adopting the consensus effort and pouring concrete around
technical industry standards for elearning.
-
Other
Learning Standards Resources
-
The
Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards
(CETIS) maintains a web site with news about IMS, ADL, EML, AICC, IEEE,
and ISO from a UK higher education perspective. CETIS is a non-profit
academic organization within the University of Wales, Bangor UK.
The CETIS Web site provides links to news items related to learning
objects and metadata standards as well as articles intended to provide the
necessary background for people who may be new in the field.
-
ASTD - an organization long
respected for its work in Human Resource Development and with its own loyal
following of corporate trainers- has signaled its intent to provide a
leadership role in various elearning futures.
-
SOAP: Simple
Object Access Protocol. A World Wide Web Consortium protocol for exchange of
information in a decentralized, distributed environment. An
XML based protocol that consists of four parts: an envelope that defines a
framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of
encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined data types, a
convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses and a binding
convention for exchanging messages using an underlying protocol.
Being studied by IMS as a protocol for handling Learning Objects.
More...
- UDDI: Universal
Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specification. UDDI a protocol
that will enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and
transact business with one another using their preferred applications. Being
studied by IMS for use with Learning Objects.
More...
- The
Managed Learning Research System
Research and Development Lab is attempting a broad vendor-neutral
program to set standards for technology in education. the Managed
Learning System (MLS) is an open-system, standards-based research and
development environment that provides the framework so that all elements
of an educational IT system can communicate and interoperate. Managed
Learning System components include educational content and delivery;
academic standards; assessment and testing; technology and business
processes. The MLS Specification does not dictate how
technology components and systems work internally – only that they be able
to work together to allow educators to make full use of their investment
in technology. It is not clear how or if this privately developed
prototype standard relates to other industry standards.
- A number of forward thinking
governments and countries have anticipated the advent of full-blown
international standards (a long and painful process, in most cases) by taking
a stab at creation of their own.
-
All about Learning
Technology Standards, based on an article by Wayne Hodgins with
Marcia Conner published first in LiNE Zine’s Fall 2000 issue.
-
An
online version of the book "The
Instructional use of Learning Objects", edited by David Wiley, is
licensed under the Open Publication License v. 2.0 meaning that you are
free to copy and redistribute them in any electronic or non-commercial
print form. You can also order a hard copy of the book for $30 from
the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, its
publisher.
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