Mixing and Matching Distance-Education Software

For the first time, evolving technical standards for software are making it possible for colleges to customize distance-learning programs by easily mixing online-learning software from multiple companies. Dozens of colleges around the world are participating in creating the new standards, and hundreds of institutions, corporations, and government bodies are already applying them.

These standards are still works in progress and will take years to develop. But experts believe they will lead to a surge in online learning, as professors start sharing more content and features of software. The predictions also include that institutions will have new freedom in how they use online-learning software from Blackboard Inc., WebCT Inc., and other vendors.

Even though technical standards for online-learning software haven't yet entered the mainstream of academic discussion, how those standards will affect academe is a "really critical question for the whole field," says Gary E. Miller, associate vice president for distance education at Pennsylvania State University. He is also executive director of the World Campus, the university's online-course arm. "Universities have to be operating on a common set of standards."

Take Penn State, for example. The university decided last year to deliver all of its online courses and Web-enhanced on-campus courses via the same software, Mr. Miller says. This software, called Angel, is made by CyberLearning Labs, a software company in Indianapolis.

The World Campus uses different software made by WebCT, a popular provider of such programs. The university expects to eventually move the World Campus from WebCT to Angel, Mr. Miller says.

Among its many features, Angel comes with a testing tool to evaluate student learning. The university, though, wants to use a different testing tool that it has developed on its own. So software developers at the World Campus removed the original tool and plugged in the one the university had built.

Both the migration and the tool switch might sound simple, but they would have been difficult or impossible only last year, Mr. Miller says. Until recently, moving data among software made by different proprietary companies has often been an arduous process that involved the risk of not being able to use old content in the new system. And the proprietary nature of the software made by many companies made swapping content or capabilities among systems difficult.

These new standards, which were used in the Angel software and the testing tool developed by Penn State, allow institutions to switch content and features in ways they never could before, he says. A professor can use content from anywhere in the world in a course, as long as the content is packaged according to certain standards. If a professor doesn't like a feature in one system, he or she can pull in a feature from another provider of software and know the two different systems will operate with each other.

Because institutions invest a lot of time and money in adopting one system, they are unlikely to replace it, says Serge J. Goldstein, the director of academic services in the Office of Information Technology at Princeton University. They instead can supplement their existing system with content and capabilities from other standards-compliant software.

Standards will also help institutions avoid getting locked into using a single vendor, Mr. Goldstein continues. The software to put courses online is playing an increasingly important role at many institutions, Mr. Goldstein says, and vendors are becoming more aware that standards are a selling point.

Standards were a make-or-break issue for Lilia R. Juele, who decided four years ago to introduce online learning at Monroe College, in Bronx, N.Y. A professor of business who is now director of Monroe's distance-learning program, she eventually suggested that Monroe create its own software to put courses online, rather than buy an off-the-shelf product.

Monroe wanted to make sure it didn't invest in proprietary software that might not be able to operate with other software the college buys, she says. Because there are still few industry standards to ensure flexibility and compatibility of software, she says, "I didn't want to lock us into a platform until the industry has matured."

Industry Backing

Blackboard and WebCT are working to make their products conform to standards. The two companies have also created software that allows customers of one to transfer data into the other's products.

Vendors will ultimately tie their products to standards, Mr. Goldstein says. But because vendors still will want an exclusive hold on users, they will add proprietary features to entice customers to choose them, he says. The customers will have all the capabilities the standards permit, as well as extra ones. The catch will be that if the customers want to transport the data to another software package, they might lose the data stored in the proprietary format.

"Everything won't interoperate perfectly," Mr. Goldstein says. The closer an institution sticks to the general standards, he says, the more it can move data and swap functions among the software it runs.

Standards can simplify professors' lives by allowing different databases to communicate with one another, Mr. Goldstein says. For example, standards exist between the online-learning software from Blackboard that Princeton uses and its administrative software from PeopleSoft Inc., he says.

Professors can create rosters of the students in each of their courses in a database in Blackboard, Mr. Goldstein says. Working just in Blackboard, the professors would have to personally update the lists whenever individuals added or dropped a course. With standards, they can automatically have the rosters updated from their institution's administrative databases in PeopleSoft.

One of the greatest obstacles that learning-software standards face is that many professors don't understand what standards can and cannot do, says Judy Brown, executive director of the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab, located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The Co-Lab is spearheading the participation of American colleges in one international effort to define standards.

Some professors, when they hear the word "standards," fear that the standards will somehow dictate how course materials must be chosen or presented, Ms. Brown says. But just as HTML doesn't dictate how content is presented on the Web, learning-software standards won't affect online teaching, she says.

Mr. Goldstein says: "Faculty doesn't think in terms of standards. They think in terms of functionality. They say, I want to move this data to here and have it work."

Worldwide Effort

Numerous consortia of corporations, government agencies, and higher-education institutions from around the world are collaborating to produce nonproprietary technical standards for online learning. One government agency, corporation, or academic institution cannot develop global standards for everyone -- it would be practically impossible for a single entity to handle such a gargantuan task by itself, says Ms. Brown. The consortia are sending software specifications, and the frameworks to use them, to international groups to approve as global standards.

So far, 40 institutions have joined the Co-Lab, in which they, government agencies, and corporations have created a Shareable Content Object Reference Model. The model provides a format readable on any software platform, similar in principle to the familiar "portable document" file that anyone can view with Adobe's Acrobat software, says Philip V.W. Dodds. He is the chief architect of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, in which government, industry, and academe are collaborating to create the model.

The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. The model has evolved through several versions, and a new version, with new capabilities, is due this summer.

Princeton and Penn State participate in the IMS Global Learning Consortium Inc., a standards-development group. The IMS consortium and the Co-Lab have made a cooperative agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the Open Knowledge Initiative that MIT is leading. The Open Knowledge program has attracted a lot of attention in academe because it plans to offer free course-management software with an open source code. The program released some of its standards to the public in March. Princeton also works directly with the Open Knowledge program.

Breaking Down Content

A core feature of the learning-technology standards is building content with smaller pieces, called content objects or learning objects, says H. Wayne Hodgins, director of worldwide learning strategies at Autodesk Inc., a company that sells software to design online content. He is also chairman of a working group of the Learning Technology Standards Committee of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The pieces can be as small as a single chart, text box, or video clip. They can also be mini-software packages, such as tools to test students' understanding of material.

Content objects are like Lego blocks, Mr. Hodgins says. Every Lego block has the same size pegs, and that standard allows any block to connect to any other block. The learning-technology standards contain code to allow people to manipulate content objects in a similar way.

Dividing content into objects allows people to pick and choose what content they want to use and how to arrange it, Mr. Hodgins says. They can reuse old content or borrow just what they need from other sources, instead of creating everything from scratch each time.

Content objects are not only efficient, but they also permit creative combinations of media to improve student learning, says Nishikant Sonwalkar, an expert in online pedagogy and principal educational architect at the Education Media Creation Center, at MIT.

Content can be arranged and rearranged easily to accommodate different learning styles, and a professor can include assessment tools to track a student's progress through the material.

When more content can easily be rearranged, distance education may grow much more quickly, says Elliott Masie, president of the Masie Center. The center studies learning technology and runs the e-Learning Consortium, a service for corporations to collaborate on online learning. The consortium is actively cultivating members from higher education, he says.

Mr. Masie and many others in the field of learning-software standards cite the example of the battle in the 1980s between the VHS and Betamax formats. The videocassette market did not boom until a de facto standard was in place, he says.