Achieving Interoperability in e-Learning
By Harvi Singh
New technologies are allowing e-learning to be leveraged beyond the corporate firewall to encompass partners, customers, and suppliers. A look at the components of next-generation e-learning systems.
In today's Internet economy, achieving integration and interoperability in digital systems is increasingly important. Such integration is possible with open protocols, which allow an organization or system to exchange information with suppliers, partners, and customers in a format that accommodates each organization's system.
The same approach is being applied in the e-learning arena, where a new breed of software application frameworks and approaches seek to enable true interoperability of separate systems. This article examines trends and enabling frameworks for making true interoperability a reality.
An e-learning wish list
Your company is getting ready to embark on e-learning. Your vision includes a mixed-mode curriculum that includes a combination of learning resources and content from internal and external sources. Learning content--both internally developed and off-the-shelf courseware--needs to flow among different business units, training departments, and custom content vendors. They're all tied together via your internal network or the Internet so they may share content resources to build online learning resources. Off-the-shelf courseware content must also be integrated and shared by business units. Both your e-learning and instructor-led training classes need to be managed together, including online registration, scheduling, personalized access, notification, and tracking.
Your learning audience is geographically dispersed and includes employees and customers. Most of their data records reside in HR and ERP applications, and you want to tap into those legacy applications to build a user database. You may even want to make e-learning available to your businesses customers, allowing them to buy your content via e-commerce transactions.
It's a tall order, but it's the order of the day in the new era of e-learning.
The e-learning framework
The framework for e-learning needs to make a giant leap forward from its origins in training management or computer-managed instruction (CMI). The e-learning system can no longer function as an independent island among an ever increasing base of online learning content and service providers, partners, suppliers, and competitors. It's also under pressure to open up and function with the business applications of partners, customers, and suppliers.
The new framework for e-learning may involve a learning management system (LMS) that resides inside your company firewall or may be hosted by a third-party application service provider (ASP). The LMS integrates various processes and tools involved in front-end performance analysis, design and development of instructional interventions, development of component-based learning content, network-based delivery of content, and management of learning and results.
In addition, the LMS incorporates links to business services that integrate internal applications, ERP applications, and external Websites or content suppliers and customers.
Content suppliers may soon manage their content repositories and provide access to individual or business consumers over the Internet through their own LMS and integration services. Furthermore, client organizations and geographically dispersed audiences (such as an organization's sales force) may access the organization's knowledge repositories and those of third-party content suppliers in a uniform manner over the Internet.
How is this all supposed to work? For organizations to integrate e-learning services, content, and applications effectively, a software infrastructure must be deployed that meets the following key requirements:
- Accessibility. The e-learning framework must provide access to knowledge and related data on a cross-enterprise, anywhere, anyplace basis.
- Flexibility. The e-learning environment must provide a flexible workflow and process model that can be fine-tuned and configured to meet an organization's needs. At another level, it must support different learning design paradigms (such as performance support and training) and structured and unstructured forms of learning engagement.
- Extensibility. As technology and requirements evolve, the e-learning framework must allow for additional components to be integrated easily using some form of open and component-based software architecture.
- Reusability. Content reusability is critical to save the time and cost of training content development. In a modern e-learning environment, content must be created in components that are indexed on the basis of standardized metadata, which allows learning objects or constituent parts to be reused by creators or consumers of the content. Value can be added rapidly.
- Interoperability. The e-learning framework must allow content and other data to be exchanged and shared by separate tools and systems connected via the Internet. The network and Web protocols or technologies allow content structures to be exposed in a manner that allows content packages, in whole or part, to be reused in other contexts.
- Scalability. The e-learning framework must achieve scalability by permitting access to potentially hundreds of thousands of users and large content repositories. Scalability may be achieved through the use of multiprocessor systems that allow high-volume processing of online learning content and transactions.
- Security. While internal business applications are opened to external partners, customers, and suppliers to achieve faster access and improved service, the e-learning framework must not compromise the security of data, information, or knowledge.
- Standards compliance. Standards are playing a growing, important role in e-learning. The standards efforts and collaborations span learning resource metadata (data about learning resources), open content structures, user management data, and enterprise application integration services.
- Leveraging of existing corporate infrastructure. While linking to external Websites and content repositories, e-learning frameworks must also leverage existing corporate IT infrastructures containing relevant HR and financial data.
Components of e-learning
Components of an e-learning framework may come from various vendors or providers. However, they need to be integrated in order to provide a seamless interface for end users.
The Internet provides a means for combining e-learning services from vendors of content, e-commerce, LMSs, and other tools to provide an integrated solution. Interoperability and data exchange between these disparate systems is key to achieving the distributed e-learning vision.
Following are several key components of an e-learning framework.
Learning management systems. An LMS provides an integrated platform for content, delivery, and management of learning, as well as accessibility by a range of users that may include learners, content creators, and administrators. An LMS acts as the central component of an enterprise e-learning implementation.
An LMS must be capable of handling various delivery modes--online, instructor-led, self-paced, collaborative, facilitated, nonfacilitated, and the like. In addition, an LMS must automate the cumbersome process of learner enrollment, registration, records, transcripts, schedules, and reports. And it must incorporate evaluation, assessment, and testing capabilities.
Content composition and integration systems. Content integration systems include content authoring, sequencing, and aggregation tools that allow content to be structured in an instructionally sound manner to facilitate the learning process. Such systems allow multiple content developers and subject matter experts to share content and its components over the network. They make use of instructional templates and forms to speed the development and delivery of content over a network.
There's growing consensus around an object-based approach to constructing content for online delivery. Described variously as learning object, content object, and information object approaches, the concept is based on chunking content into reusable components and building a flexible hierarchy to create instructional sequences (see "Learning Object Pioneers" article). Content at every level may be indexed to support search and reuse. The content components can come from various sources and can include various data types (text, graphics, audio, video, animation, simulations, and so forth). Content components could also include interactive activities, test questions, and games.
The componentization of the content provides several benefits from a content development and delivery perspective. From the development perspective, reusability decreases the time and cost of content development. From the delivery perspective, a higher level of individualization is possible by "late binding," or personalization, of curriculum with individual needs and interests. In addition, the online content is linked to an LMS so that the content may be organized, searched, launched, and tracked.
Learning content metadata. The e-learning framework needs to support and manage not only learning content but also metadata (searchable properties), administrative, and management data. The metadata allows the online learning resources to be tagged with searchable properties or attributes (such as author, publisher name, keywords, version, language, and learning objectives). The metadata needs to be stored in a repository separate (but linked) from the learning content.
Use of standardized metadata allows organizations to tag, store, and retrieve online content resources in their own repositories and those of their external, third-party content suppliers over the Internet.
Learner profiles. True individualization of content is achievable in an e-learning framework by profiling each learner, managing profiles in a database, and dynamically matching an individual's needs and preferences against a repository of content. These profiles may be exchanged between LMS systems or retrieved in batch mode or near real-time mode from a legacy or ERP application.
E-commerce services. The e-learning framework offers a transactional environment where both business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce transactions may take place. The e-commerce transaction processing may reside outside the e-learning framework, but an e-learning framework ensures proper message routing and data exchange between an LMS and an e-commerce server.
Legacy system integration services. An e-learning framework needs to take advantage of standard Internet technologies and provide quick, cost-effective integration with existing systems--such as ERP, e-commerce, databases, and other operational systems--in a nonintrusive manner.
The browser as universal interface.The surging popularity of the Web has resulted in the evolution of the Web browser as the most consistent cross-platform solution for browsing multimedia data. A Web-enabled LMS that provides content integration and e-commerce can be accessed by users consistently and conveniently from any location on the Internet or intranets. Web browsers will continue to evolve and support new multimedia, interactivity, and collaborative technologies. Any distributed e-learning framework will naturally benefit from these advancements.
Implementing open e-learning via XML
The future of e-learning is truly distributed. The Internet provides the underlying plumbing through which an LMS and e-learning components that span your organization's network--and those of your content suppliers, ASPs, customers, and partners--are integrated.
The LMS component of an e-learning solution must operate in a network-based, client/server (browser-based) environment that may be deployed in an enterprise-wide capacity via the mechanisms afforded by the Internet and intranets. The LMS may reside inside your own firewall or be hosted and managed by an ASP. The LMS usually deploys a large, scalable repository providing an underpinning for integrating and sharing data between different processes, tools, applications, and learning content. The data repository ensures that the data across different processes is shared and that different projects can share data to avoid redundancy.
XML (Extended Markup Language), which is fast becoming a standard format for Internet/intranet data information exchange, serves as an excellent means for representing data to provide an open, Internet-based integration of cross-enterprise e-learning applications.
A few examples of information and data that may be exchanged in an XML format include
- learning content catalog records
- learning resources or content documents (with corresponding rich presentation and navigation structures)
- e-commerce transactions for electronic content
- administrative records of learners' progress
- configuration and log files.
XML provides several benefits over HTML or other data formats in an e-learning framework. The most attractive benefit is its simplicity. XML can enable business data and learning content to be served, received, and processed on the Web as easily as HTML over such standard Internet protocols as HTTP. It also works easily across organizational boundaries.
XML allows separation of style from content. By separating the data from its presentation style, XML provides a flexible model for multimode delivery of content in which different styles can be applied on the same data for different contexts or needs.
XML can facilitate learning resource searches since XML structures can be easily parsed or indexed for search purposes. IMS is defining XML-based metadata vocabularies for standardized tagging of learning resources.
The learning content can be structured using XML documents. Content structured in XML has a self-describing quality, allowing it to be "played" on any XML-enabled LMS regardless of the authoring environment in which it originated.
The subsystems within an e-learning ecosystem must be adapted to communicate with other systems using XML so they can route requests or translate messages involving user data, learning objects, progress tracking data, or e-commerce transactions.
Online learning will continue to evolve and embrace new methods, such as learning object-based curriculum design, competency-based learning, performance, and knowledge management to meet learning and performance needs. Meanwhile, e-learning frameworks must advance from an enterprise mindset to a cross-enterprise, business-to-business integration mindset.
Next-generation e-learning infrastructures will no longer be confined within the firewalls of an organization. Instead, they will bridge to ASPs to provide LMS services, hosting facilities, content suppliers, partners, and customers. The era of integration and interoperability has only just begun.
Published: March 2000