Technical Standards for Learning Objects

The issue of Instructional Design technical standards,  compliance, SCORM, metadata tests and W3C HTML validation came up in the course I am doing. This is an area best avoided, unless someone is paying you to do it, as it is frustrating, time consuming and never ending. The Australian VET E-standards is a reasonable overview.

One general point: Most learning objects are a ZIP file which contains folders, the folders have web format  files for the content in them (HTML, CSS, JPEG, PNG). There are also some XML files with metadata (cataloging information) and quiz questions. E-books use a similar format.

The standards issue comes up with which version of file formats are used (HTML 4, XHTML, HTML 5 ...), what the folder structure is and what metadata is included. Vendors of products make claims as to what they support and educational institutions get stuck with particular products.

What I do is try to avoid using anything more than basic web formats for my educational content, so that this will more easily convert from one system to another. As an example, I use default formatting for headings and text. I do not specify the font, color, or size of text, so it will appear using the default of the system it is imported into. The result can look dull, but at least the student is likely to be able to read it and I don't have to spend hours fixing the formatting.

Just to show off, if you look through "IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata" (1484.12.1-2002) you will see my name it (I was on the balloting group, contributed one comment and then voted "yes"). ;-)

Australian Technical Standards for Online Course Materials

The E-standards Expert Group has issued updated standards for online course materials for the vocational education and training sector in Australia: "VET E-standards for Training" (Department of Industry, 10 April 2014). While aimed at TAFEs and non-government Registered Training Organisations (RTOs), these standards are equally applicable for schools and universities. The standards recommended are not controversial, being commonly used on the web.

What might be less familiar are the formats for packaging educational material, such as IMS Content Packaging (Version 1.1.4) and SCORM 1.2. There will still be difficult decisions to be made, for example, if you have some content, should you package it as an EPUB ebook, IMS or SCORM?

In many cases these standards will not be so important to individual course designers and teachers, as they will have to use what the software provided by their institution supports. However, educators should keep the standards in mind so that their content can be ported more easily from system to system.

In practice I try to use simply formatted web pages for course content. I use HTML in preference to PDF, Powerpoint and DOCX files. This way the content can be converted to other formats as required and can be assembled into e-books and modules, using whichever packaging standard is appropriate.