Demystifying E-learning Standards

What are e-learning standards? What do people who implement and design e-learning understand by these standards?

E-learning standards where developed to make content created flexible enough to be used in different contexts. Learning content and resources can be more sensible and articulated for students and developers. E-learning standards are agreements that the people using e-learning can agree upon. E.g. How e-learning content should be tagged. These will be proposed by specification group which then present it to an official board for standardization.

Standards can be de facto which means that they are being followed by the whole or most of the e-learning community before they are actually standardized. For example, XML is a de facto standard as it was adapted by most of the Web developers. Standards should be able to be updated and accept new concepts. Hence, learning content can be integrated but also content from other sources. Another type of standards is de jure which means that they are specified by the Law and are certified by an official body.

Standards to e-learner designers and implementers mean that they have unambiguous and major capabilities:

• Content portability – content can be removed from the original context and used in another context.
• Granularity – smaller units of information give raise to learning at the needed moment
• Interoperability – e-learning applications can share raw data and content but also different applications can access and interchange content.

Standards are important because they have been adopted by the e-learning community and hey can protect the investment done in an e-learning system.

Ref:

Singh H, Reed, C. (2002). Demystifiying E-learning Standards. Industrial and Commercial Training, 65-68.