February 26, 2001

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Standards Needed For E-Learning To Take Off

By Diane Rezendes Khirallah   (drezende@cmp.com)

hough it's arguably one of the hottest growth areas in IT, E-learning could grind to a screeching halt unless standards problems are successfully addressed.

Strictly speaking, there are no formal E-learning standards, says Harvi Singh, co-founder and chief learning technologist at MindLever.com Inc. There are groups working on sets of specifications for individual areas in E-learning, he says, such as how content should be tagged. Then groups submit their ideas to an official sanctioning body, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which has yet to set any formal E-learning standards.

As part of their strategic partnerships, many vendors have to be deeply involved in emerging standards. Says Andrew Sadler, IBM Mindspan Solutions VP of strategy and alliances, "We're starting to see more cooperation, where even a year ago it was competitive"--for example, between Scorm (Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model) and IMS (Instructional Management System), two of the groups working to set E-learning standards.

"Everyone has gazillions of partnerships with others," says Robby Robson, Saba Software Inc.'s standards evangelist and chair of the IEEE's Learning Technology Standards Committee. "Saba needs, wants, and promotes" all the emergent standards to ensure compatibility. As for users, most don't care about standards per se--they care about value, which "comes from reusing content, interoperability, and student profiling," says Wayne Hodgins, strategic futurist and director of worldwide learning strategies for Autodesk Inc. and chairman of the Learning Object Metadata Standards Committee for the IEEE.

Michael Pope, senior staff training systems integrator for Lockheed Martin Corp. in Bethesda, Md., says his company chose not to get involved in standards in the past, but that will change. "With stronger players in the standards bodies," he says, "it makes sense for us to get involved at this stage."

Two issues loom large: interoperability--whether a system is plug-and-play--and metadata tagging, a form of indexing the content and its media. Tagging is essential to reusing E-learning materials. The biggest obstacle E-learning must overcome to reach its potential is in defining the form of content and the medium so one can reuse it, says Michael Hackney, chief technology officer of E-learning vendor Centra Software Inc. "Some of it can be done automatically. With PowerPoint, we can auto-generate a tag from the title or bullet points," he says. "But how do you index a video that can run 30 minutes or more, even two hours?"

The federal government is backing Scorm and has declared that any E-learning provider that wants to do business with it must be Scorm-compliant, which could also help Scorm become the de facto industry standard. But that could pose a threat to early leaders, such as DigitalThink Inc. and SmartForce plc, that have their own proprietary standards. "I tell companies when they buy learning-management systems or content, be sure it's Scorm-compliant, or at least plan to become Scorm-compliant," says Brandon Hall, an E-learning expert and lead researcher at Brandon-hall.com.

"Scorm offers the [industry's] first good chance at integration," says Lockheed Martin's Pope. But he'd like to see "some kind of certification levels, where minimum compliance would be a level one, more would be a level two, and so on," he says, so that customers have an understanding of what "Scorm-compliant" means.

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Illustration by Lorraine Tuson

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