October 9, 2006
Getting Together at Educause
The annual Educause conference brings together company and college officials from all over the country to discuss recent trends in higher education and technology. Officials are also using this year's event in Dallas to announce strategic partnerships between their organizations.
The IMS Global Learning Consortium, a nonprofit organization that creates education-technology standards, has announced the development of open standards for online learning to be adopted by least 30 organizations. Called the Common Cartridge, the production standards for e-learning systems and their contents will allow faculty members to exchange online course information betweem different technology platforms. Among the organizations signing on to the new standards are the Sakai Project, an open-source software organization; McGraw-Hill Education, a publishing company; and Angel Learning, a course-management-software company. Products made under the new standards could be available as soon as spring 2007, IMS officials said.
In a separate announcement at Educause, Blackboard Inc., the education-software company, and SAP, which sells administrative technology, have unveiled their own partnership to integrate their platforms. The two giants in higher education are offering a Web service that will allow users to share information between the two companies' administrative and course-management technology systems. The companies said the partnership would not only add convenience, but would also make it easier for college officials to track educational outcomes of students and institutions. --Dan Carnevale
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It is important for the readers to understand that there are currently administrative system providers such as Oracle working within the nonprofit IMS Global Learning Consortium to create open standards for the type of integration mentioned between administrative (SAP) and course management (Blackboard) systems. SAP is not currently a member or participant in IMS and, as such, is not involved in this work. Buyers need to understand that proprietary integration schemes limit their choice and involve greater total cost of ownership. There has been quite a bit of “lip service” to standards and we are doing our best to change that. As such, IMS will be developing a certification and compliance program for the next generation of enterprise data exchange and I suggest that buyers look to the IMS web site (www.imsglobal.org) to see which vendors are participating members and which products are compliant. This new generation will focus on real-time provisioning as well as analytics for measuring student acheivement and institutional performance.
Rob Abel
CEO
IMS Global Learning Consortium
http://www.imsglobal.org/
— Rob Abel Oct 10, 02:20 AM #