The research context
IMS Global Learning1|(IMS) was established by a consortium of universities and companies in order to ensure that the market for global distributed learning could leverage the benefits of the Web. The principal intervention made by IMS to achieve this goals has been to develop and publish specifications for eLearning interoperability. The initial focus of IMS was on interoperability of learning objects, and the specifications which they published for this purpose (such as IMS Content Packaging and Learning Object Metadata), together with applications such as RELOAD, made a substantial contribution to the ability of applications to share learning resources.
Nevertheless, when an author builds a course in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) such as Blackboard or Moodle, it cannot normally be run in a different system, and nor are compatible export and import formats available. This prevents sharing of courses and pedagogic approaches beyond the boundaries of individual systems. It also reduces the flexibility available to educational institutions by making it difficult for them to move from one VLE to another. Thus while IMS specifications enabled learning objects to be shared, the activities which carried out using those objects could not be exchanged. IMS developed the IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) specification as a response to this problem, see (UNFOLD, 2005) and (Koper & Tattersall, 2005). IMS-LD is a modelling language which can be used to represent any learning process. This can then be used as an input to a compliant system, which can take responsibility for coordinating the activities to be carried out by learners and teachers.
The IMS-LD specification is, however, very extensive and complex, and is also expressed in XML which is hard for users who are not programmers to understand. This problem was addressed by a grant from JISC, which funded development of the RELOAD IMS-LD Editor. The application makes it substantially easier for teachers and learning technologists to understand the modelling concepts which underly this complex specification, by hiding the syntax and handling dependencies.
The RELOAD IMS-LD Editor.was the first IMS-LD editor, and is recognised as the reference implementation. It has been used, adopted and extended by many JISC projects, and the European projects UNFOLD, Collage, ProLearn, OpenDock and Planet DR.
Functional innovation
The Reload LD Editor, in versions 1.0 through 2.1.3, is a general purpose editor for IMS LD, which is close to the specification, using the classification of editors proposed in (Griffiths, Blat, Garcia, Vogten, & Kwong, 2005). In this it is similar to the earlier Reload Metadata and Content Packaging Editor. The size of the specification is, however, an order of magnitude greater than the specifications which had been tackled previously and so much more information has to be handled and represented. Moreover the information provided by the user in, for example, the IMS LOM metadata specification is passive, in that each additional piece of information adds to the description, but does not change the value or function of any previously defined information. In the LD Editor, on the other hand, the data has semantic value. For example a change in the resources defined in an environment may have implications for a role part, and the application has to keep track of these relationships, and represent them in a comprehensible way to the user. The Reload LD Editor presents the whole of the IMS-LD specification to the author. Support is provided by hiding the syntax of the specification, and in handling all the dependencies generated in the authoring process.
Technical innovation
An IMS-LD Unit of Learning is itself contained within a Content Package, and so a logical starting point was to build the new editor based on the Reload Content Packaging editor. Consequently the first version of the Reload LD tools, a level A editor, was based on the Reload architecture developed for the Metadata and Content Packaging Editor, described in (Beauvoir & Griffiths, 2007). Problems soon became apparent, however, when using this framework to develop an IMS-LD editor. The user interface (UI) needed extensive changes in order to represent the complexity of IMS-LD in a comprehensible manner, and the creation of new interface elements was a lengthy task. More fundamentally, the "Schema based" approach, which had been highly successful for specifications which have a tree structure, like Metadata and CP, started to create more problems than it solved when faced with the complexity of the semantic schema of IMS-LD.
For these reasons the LD Editor required a new architecture. Rather than extend the architecture which had been developed for Reload v 1, it was seen to be more effective to adopt good development practice identified in other fields. The combination of these techniques to create an editor for an eLearning specification has been a significant innovation. The approach may be summarized as follows:
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The approach to development adopted by Reload
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Agile development
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Release early, release often, get feedback from users
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Open Source
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Open Source licensing enables other developers to build on the work done. A license was chosen which allows commercial use of the code, to maximise adoption.
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Use of a CVS
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Provides support for coordination of the development team and documents progress.
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Post builds regularly
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End users need to have regular access to updated builds which they can install and use.
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Unit testing
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Reload used the JUnit framework, and this contributed significantly to the robustness and maintainability of the final application.
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Use of frameworks
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The Eclipse framework (selected from a number of alternatives) has a flexible plug-in architecture, which enables other developers to develop their own components which can integrate with Reload, and it provides an extensive set of UI features which run natively on the different target platforms (and so much faster).
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The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by the long and continuing use of the application, the large number of downloads, recommendations from key user groups, and add-ons. It may be reasonably claimed that Reload is a reference application for editing IMS-LD, in that the ability to import a Unit of Learning (UOL) to Reload is seen as evidence of compliance with the IMS-LD specification. The value of the framework has been shown by ability of other developers to build on the application, for example Collage (Hernández-Leo et al., 2006), the Planet tool (Blat et al., 2006), and the DesignShare project which is at present completing integration of Reload with the OpenDocument.net repository. The success of the approach is also borne out by its adoption for client software in the current TENCompetence project (TENCompetence, 2006).
Adoption of the Reload LD Editor
The target user group was technical staff within groups developing eLearning courses, with a relatively high level of technical knowledge, although not necessarily programming skills or the ability to edit XML. The Reload LD Editor was the first to enable this user group to create Units of Learning with IMS LD, and remains the most widely used application for this purpose. The application has been widely downloaded, and is generally recognised as the reference application for IMS LD. It has been used as the basis of further development work by Collage, ProLearn, OpenDock and Planet DR.
Bibliography
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Beauvoir, P., & Griffiths, D. (2007). Issues and Solutions in Providing Tools for Elearning Interoperability Specifications: the Case Of Reload. Paper presented at the Knowledge and Innovation 2007, The University of Bolton.
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Blat, J., Griffiths, D., Navarrete, T., Santos, J. L., García, P., & Pujol, J. (2006). PlanetDR, a scalable architecture for federated repositories supporting IMS Learning Design. Paper presented at the Learning Networks for Lifelong Competence Development, Sofia.
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CETIS. (2002-2007). RELOAD Reusable eLearning Object Authoring & Delivery. Retrieved 10th March, 2007, from http://www.reload.ac.uk/
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Griffiths, D., Blat, J., Garcia, R., Vogten, H., & Kwong, K. (2005). Learning Design Tools. In R. Koper & C. Tattersall (Eds.), Learning Design: modelling and implementing network-based education & training (pp. 109-135): Springer Verlag.
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Hernández-Leo, D., Asensio-Perez, J. I., Dimitriadis, Y., Jorrín-Abellán, I. M., Ruiz-Requies, I., & Rubia-Avi, B. (2006). COLLAGE: A collaborative Learning Design editor based on patterns. Educational Technology & Society, 9(1), 58-71.
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Koper, R. (2007). Open source and open standards in e-learning research. In.
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Koper, R., & Tattersall, C. (Eds.). (2005). Learning Design: modelling and implementing network-based education & training: Springer.
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McAndrew, P., Little, A., & Nadolski, R. (2005). Developing an approach for Learning Design Players. Journal of Interactive Media in Education (Advances in Learning Design. Special Issue, eds. Colin Tattersall, Rob Koper, 14.
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Osherove, R. (2006). The Art of Unit Testing (book in writing). Retrieved May 30th, 2007, from http://the.artofunittesting.com/
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TENCompetence. (2006). Project Website. Retrieved 31st August 2007 from http://www.tencompetence.org/
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UNFOLD. (2005). UNFOLD showcase. Retrieved 18th March, 2007, from www.unfold-project.net