Educational specification groups
Australian Organisations
Education Network Australia (EdNA) - EdNA is a cross sectoral service supporting the benefits of the Internet for learning, education and training in Australia. EdNA metadata - an extension of Dublin Core – was the first metadata standard to be used across Australian education. EdNA hosts several discussion groups:
- The EdNA Developer Newsletter provides updates, changes and information about EdNA services. To join, send a blank email to join-edna_developer@edna.edu.au.
- To join the EdNA Developer Discussion List, send a blank email to join-developers@edna.edu.au.
- To join a cross-sectoral meta-taggers list for librarians, information managers, and others about metadata creation and implementation, send a blank, plain text email to join-meta-taggers@edna.edu.au.
http://www.edna.edu.au
IMS
IMS Global Learning Consortium - a US based worldwide non-profit organisation comprising members representing all facets of the industry and academia. IMS specifications have become de facto standards and have heavily influenced IEEE standards and SCORM. The major IMS specifications include:
- IMS Content Packaging for the transfer of materials between Learning Management Systems (LMS).
- IMS Metadata for the consistent description of resources - based on the LOM work done with IEEE.
- IMS Digital Repositories Interoperability (DRI) specification - builds on IMS Metadata and IMS Content Packaging to assist interoperability between digital object repositories.
- IMS Simple Sequencing - controls the movement of the learner within the LMS.
- IMS Learning Design - provides a way to describe learning strategies and how resources fit into these strategies.
- IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) description of questions and tests in XML so they can be used in different systems.
The IMS Compliance Program, provides vendors of conformant products with the right to use the the IMS Conformant Logo, and to have their products included on a list of Conformant Products. The Compliance Program aims to establish realistic measures of interoperability and increase those measures over time, as best practice and more rigorous testing capabilities become available. For more information, see: http://www.imsglobal.org/conformance/index.html
IMS has set up an RSS news feed which will highlight the latest releases on the website. To access the feed, go to: http://www.imsglobal.org/news.xml.
http://www.imsproject.org
Other international organisations
ARIADNE Foundation - a European non-profit collaboration of educational and corporate member institutions devoted to increasing the awareness of ICT based training and furthering the use and development of the tools and methodologies stemming from the ARIADNE I & II projects. ARIADNE have developed extensive specifications, software tools supporting learning objects, have extensive repositories throughout Europe known as "Knowledge Pool" and their work on metadata contributed greatly to the IMS metadata specification.
http://www.ariadne-eu.org
Center for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) - represents
UK Higher and Further Education on international educational standards initiatives
such as IMS, IEEE, ISO and CEN/ISSS.
CETIS works on various topic areas which they call domains (eg; accessibility, metadata). Each domain has discussion lists, wikis and meetings. Membership is predominantly from the UK but they are a lively source of information and discussion, much of which is of international relevance.
http://www.cetis.ac.uk
