Impact of Standards Work on Australian Education



This article provides examples of how Australian involvement in technical standards has been directly beneficial to Australian education initiatives. The paper describes how technical standards enable an education delivery scenario that would not have been possible a few years ago. An argument is made for continued involvement in technical standards development.



© Copyright 2010 University of Southern Queensland


Context

Information and communications technologies (ICT) are an ever-present part of our lives and impact on almost all that we do. The Digital Education Revolution (DER) recognises the important role that technology can play in supporting education. Teaching and learning has always been about collaboration and communication, creating learning materials, sharing them, adapting them, assessing learning and showcasing it. The DER is examining ways these processes can be enhanced through information and communications technology.

Digital technologies are the mainstream choice for communication, collaboration, authoring, publishing, sharing, adapting, showcasing, etc. in many sectors of the economy. Education, however, has requirements that are unique to it and technologies must be adapted to meet these requirements.

Standards work happens in the background so that educators can seamlessly access resources and functionality to improve learning outcomes. Australia has been at the forefront of global development of technical standards that document community agreements about how education systems work and communicate. The technical standards enable ICT systems to work together seamlessly to support teaching, learning and administration. They reduce the amount of effort required to build education ICT systems, improve the effectiveness of those systems, and also support new aspects of teaching and learning not previously possible.

A measure of the effectiveness of standards is when educators and learners do not know that they are there – what they are doing just works. If we look at what educators are able to do now compared to just a few years ago, then examine how that has been achieved, we can start to appreciate the impact that the development and implementation of technical standards for education is having.


Impact of standards

While there has been no formal research into the impact that standards to support education is having in Australia, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that demonstrates where standards are being used to support technology related initiatives that are changing the way education is delivered. To illustrate this, it is useful to examine a number of activities that could now be considered commonplace.


Scenario

A teacher wishes to find content for use in a class, adapt it to meet local needs and share that content with peers. The teacher creates and shares assessments relevant to the learning activity. Students produce content as part of the learning activity and share the content as evidence of their capability using e-portfolios.

Figure 1: Scenario

The following takes place:

  • Discover: The teacher performs a search looking for accessible content that can be adapted for local use. The resources must meet a number of specific educational needs (e.g. age appropriateness, matched to meet curriculum objectives, include support for specific disabilities). General web search engines are not able to do this. They do not understand educational soundness/appropriateness. They are also not able to search many education specific repositories. A number of education repositories are searched and results returned to the teacher. The teacher is successful in finding some appropriate resources. Each has licences that allow for the teachers intended usage.
  • Adapt/Use/Publish: The teacher adapts a resource to meet the class's specific needs. This 'derivative work' is then published so that other teachers can use/adapt it.
  • Assess: The teacher creates an assessment activity consisting of a number of questions about the lesson that will also be shared for use by other teachers. The assessment activity becomes a more formal part of the subject for the class and results contribute towards overall assessment for the students. The teacher uses an online learning environment to capture results from the assessment and feed them into a student record system.
  • Share evidence: Students create their own content as an activity related to the initial work which some of them may choose to include in their e-portfolios. Students may move on to other schools and export all or part of their e-portfolios to the e-portfolio provided for them at their next school. They choose to share parts of their e-portfolios with prospective employers.

This relatively simple sequence of events is a highly plausible scenario in a 21st Century learning environment and parts of it are already taking place in Australian education institutions.


Standards enabling the scenario

To support these activities, a number of standards were used in the background. The following diagram illustrates the standards that have been used to implement parts of the scenario in various Australian education sectors:

Figure 2: Standards enabling the Scenario

  • Content discovery: Content can be discovered in schools and VET sector classrooms through state and national portals due to use of IMS Learning Object Metadata (LOM) to describe learning content, use of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to collect those descriptions, and use of Search Retrieve by URL (SRU) and OpenSearch to search content collections.
  • Adapt / Use / Publish Content: Learning content produced by national and state based projects in the schools and VET sector can be distributed, used and adapted in classrooms due to conformance to a number of specifications, including IMS Content Packaging, ADL SCORM, W3C XHTML and W3C CSS specifications. Learning content produced by national schools and VET sector projects can be used by learners with a range of abilities and disabilities due to conformance to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Licences to use and adapt the content are increasingly being encoded using Creative Commons and AESharenet online licences.
  • Assess: The IMS Question & Test Interoperability Specification has been used as the basis for the Global Education website provided through AusAid, and TAFE Tasmania’s iQTI and GURU mobile assessment systems. The Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF) is being trialled as a mechanism for sharing student outcomes in the schools sectors.
  • Share evidence: The IMS ePortfolio specification has been an important reference specification for the development and design of ePortfolio applications. It has been used by the DEEWR-funded MyFuture portal. SIF is being trialled as a mechanism for sharing student outcomes in the schools sectors.

Additionally, standards such as SIF and LDAP are being used to provision information on students and teachers into online learning environments.


Emerging standards

Although parts of the scenario above are already deployed in Australian education, learning technology is a rapidly developing area. A number of standards are currently in development internationally or are being deployed in Australian education projects to better support and even extend the scenario:

Figure 3: Emerging Standards

  • Content discovery: ISO Metadata for Learning Resources standard is emerging as the next generation international metadata standard for describing learning content. A machine-readable version of the Australian curriculum is being developed using W3C semantic web technologies that will allow closer linking of learning content and curriculum outcomes. OASIS SWS and IMS LODE are next generation search protocols that are cognisant of the complex relationships between learning content.
  • Adapt / Use / Publish Content: Both the schools and VET sectors are currently investigating integrating social Web 2.0 tools into learning content via the IMS Common Cartridge and Learning Tools interoperability specifications. Emerging web content standards such as HTML5 may also supplant Flash as the development technology of choice for interactive learning content.
  • Assess: IMS Learning Tools interoperability allows communication between learning content and assessment systems. The IMS LTI specification supports communication of assessment outcomes between learning environments and student management systems.
  • Share evidence: LEAP2A is a semantic web specification aimed at representation of e-Portfolios constructed from a variety of web sources. The IMS LTI specification supports communication of learning outcomes between student record systems and e-Portfolio environments.

Both the schools and VET sectors are actively investigating OpenID and OAuth technologies as lightweight authentication technologies that support single sign-on and access control requirements.


Reflections

Australian standards analysts have contributed to the development of and/or adoption and adaptation of many of these specifications to contribute to the progress of Australian education in the 21st Century. Without a focus on many parallel and even competing standards, it would not have been possible to support the scenario above.

In addition, further work is in progress on specifications such as IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) to enable educators and learners to incorporate Web 2.0 services and content into their learning environments (Learning Management Systems) as the next generation of tools and services become available and in demand for teaching and learning. The drive towards personalised learning, or ‘learner at the centre’, is creating a new set of challenges for education systems that must respond to the needs of their educators and students. Standards will play an increasingly important role in supporting those systems.

By examining commonplace activities such as those listed in this paper, we can start to see the impact that standards for interoperability is making. However, impact is not only visible in the classroom. Schools systems and Governments are realising that they cannot hope to achieve all they are striving for on their own. There is increased recognition for the importance of collaboration and sharing between systems/education departments. To achieve this, interoperability becomes more important and the work of standards organisations even more relevant.

Interoperability opens up more potential for innovation and work on open, ‘easy to implement’ specifications creates opportunities to provide richer, more meaningful environments to support teaching and learning in the 21st Century.

Southern Cross