The research context
Computers and the Internet have enormous potential for promoting the exchange and sharing of learning objects which could be combined to create courses. Unfortunately interoperability problems caused by diverse systems and file formats severely reduced this potential. The IMS Global Learning (IMS) was established by a consortium of universities and companies in order to overcome these problems and ensure that the market for global distributed learning could leverage the benefits of the Web. The principal intervention made by IMS to achieve these goals has been to develop and publish specifications for eLearning interoperability.
The specifications which IMS develops consist of three items: an information model, a best practise guide, and an XML binding. This is no more than a set of documents proposed to the education community, it has no force as a standard, or even as a recommendation, and its success depends on
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the degree to which it is adopted by users
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the degree to which compliant editors and runtime systems achieve practical interoperability.
RELOAD addresses both of these aspects. In the first place it provides tools which make it possible for users who are not programmers to develop resources which are compliant with IMS specifications. Secondly it constitutes a reference implementation which provides an established interpretation of the specifications handled by RELOAD to other developers who are implementing them.
Thus the combination of the is what is happening here, this is a big problem being solved by the standard plus the tool.
The RELOAD suite is a ground breaking implementation of IMS LD Metadata, Content Packaging and the ADSL SCORM, providing dedicated editors for interoperability specifications which hide the complexity of XML syntax, transparent management of resources, and a generic editor framework for IMS specifications.
The RELOAD project was funded by JISC in August 2002. The project was based at the University of Bolton, under the management of CETIS. The specifications supported in the Reload applicaton verson 1.0 were IMS Metadata, IMS Content Packaging. Version 1.1 added support for reusable Content Objects (RCO) using the more complex SCORM 1.2 specification.
Functional innovation
IMS specifications require authors to create a content package consisting of a manifest expressed in XML, which is distributed in a Zip file together with those resources which are referred to in the manifest. The aim of the Reload editor was to dramatically reduce the difficulty of this process, with the goal of greatly expand the number of people able to author learning materials using IMS specifications. The target users of the application were learning technologists and those teachers who were willing to spend some time getting to grips with the specifications and their purpose. The result was an innovative solution to a newly identified set of user needs in educational technology.
Two significant technical difficulties faced by users were identified
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Supporting users in creating well-formed XML. IMS Content Packages must be defined with well formed XML with reference to a schema published by IMS which specifies the elements to be recognised by the application processing the manifest. Prior to cthis could be done either by using generic text editors (which required a very high level of knowledge of XML) or specialist XML tools (which are in themselves highly complex and targeted at professional developers). Either approach could only be carried out by institutions who could afford to employ IT professionals to work with pedagogic and subject area specialists. The complexity of creating well formed manifests is addressed by presenting to the user only those elements which require input from the author. These can be navigated in an expandable tree structure, making it easy for the user to understand how the different elements relate to each other.
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Supporting users in creating coherent structures. If a Content Package is to function correctly the manifest must not only be well formed, but must also correctly reference the resources associated with it. This is not a simple matter for the author, because the resources are referred to not simply by file names, but by unique identifiers which are hard for authors to read, remember and compare. The RELOAD editor enables the author to drag and drop resources into the appropriate place in the tree structure, transparently manages the assignation of Unique Resource Identifiers in those parts of the manifest where they are required, and creates a zip file with the required files in the correct structure. This is of particular importance when HTML resources are used, as all the references to image files and other resources are identified and handled transparently.
The result is an authoring system which removes the principal difficulties facing the author of learning resources using IMS LOM and Content Packaging.
Technical innovation
The first generation of the RELOAD suite was built in Java using the Swing development framework. This strategy was adopted in order to maintain flexibility, enabling Reload to be adapted if specifications were changed at a later date, and to facilitate the development of editors for future IMS specifications. The simplest approach to implementation is to build a Java class binding for each of the specifications to be edited, and then to create a user interface which enables the user to perform operations using that library. The disadvantages with this approach, however, are that a) any change to the specification requires changes to the libraries, and b) that for each specification implemented a new Java class binding has to be developed.
A more generic and maintainable approach adopted was developed by RELOAD . This used the IMS Schema as a driving data model document, so that the detailed structure of the editor presented to the end user is generated from the schemas of the IMS specifications themselves.
The framework which was developed is shown here|.
This framework provides a generic solution which can read, parse and model a schema as a Document Object Model (DOM). This schema DOM is used to generate an editable instance DOM which can hold the entries made by the user. As indicated in Figure 1, the schema DOM is integrated with helper files and vocabulary lists to generate a number of different interfaces for editing various specifications.
An innovative aspect of this work was the development of the SCORM 1.2 runtime environment. A SCORM 1.2 Re-usable Content Object (RCO) includes information about how resources should be navigated, and questions and tests for users to respond to. Consequently an RCO must be presented to the user through a runtime player which processes and executes it, keeps track of user actions, and reports results. Adoption of the RELOAD suite
Version 1.0 of RELOAD was published in early 2003 and made available free of charge on the SourceForge web site. The success of this approach has been demonstrated by the high demand for the application, which has been downloaded thousands of times since it was first made available. Requests for support have been very low, which is a testimony to the high quality of the code and interface design, and also the help files provided. The flexible MIT type Open Source license applied to RELOAD not only enables end users to have access to the application for no charge, but also permits other developers to build on the application (including developers of proprietary code). This has promoted customisation, new vocabularies and language localisation, and other extensions from the Open Source and commercial sector. Over the life of the application these initiatives have included VDEX (IMS Vocabulary Definition Exchange from Heriot-Watt), HarvestRoad – WebDAV and other extensions, SCORM 1.3 support added by ADL, the TELCERT project, amongst many others.
The wide distribution of the application, coupled with close attention to a full and accurate implementation of IMS specifications, has led to RELOAD being recognised as a de facto reference application for those specifications which it supports. Evidence for this claim is provided by the positive feedback from the user community and from its usage amongst developers wishing to test the output of their own IMS-based tools.