The world of e-Learning standards can be confusing and daunting, not to say controversial. I'm going to try to sort out the major players in this field, and to talk about their roles in shaping the tools, technologies, and pedagogies that we and our children will be using over the next twenty years.
Obligatory disclosure statement: I'm a chairing member of the International Federation for Learning, Education, and Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI). It's a non-profit organization dedicated to improving systems interoperability and supporting innovation in learning, education, and training technology. I don't pay membership dues, and they don't pay me. I participate because I like LETSI; I really like the people who make up the community. As an organization, LETSI is in a very interesting space with an uncertain future.
As in any situated learning, to understand LETSI one must also understand the context of what and where LETSI is as an organization. Toward that end, I offer a condensed history of learning technology standards.
The wonderful world of standards
Most people hear "standards" and yawn. Heck, standards make me pass out cold, and they're largely how I've built my career.
Standards organizations make it possible for different systems to work together because standards hold the measures by which we apply and use technology across very different fields. So, for example, IEEE (a non-profit professional association for the advancement of technology) standardizes everything from power outlets to FireWire to the metadata in e-Learning content; ISO (International Organization for Standardization, an international standard-setting body) standardizes learning services, as well as light bulbs, gears, and even the cigarette.
These standards are cobbled together by individuals, out of larger common goals through an intense process of negotiation about every detail. So only through big and little points of negotiation do some of these models actually become standards. It takes a lot of commitment for a set of instructions to become an ISO or an IEEE standard. The instructions must incorporate into an ecosystem as reliable and widely adopted as the light bulb. No matter where you are in the world, you can count on getting a light bulb at a local store that will fit in a light socket from a completely different manufacturer.
With ISO and IEEE responsible for such diversity of standards, you might wonder who puts those standards together. After all, there are far more light bulbs in the world than there are e-Learning courses, which belies the fact that IEEE has standards related to e-Learning.
These large standards bodies assemble many standards, often from specifications developed by smaller, more focused consortia. Much of e-Learning, as we know it today, was spawned by two such consortia: AICC and IMS Global. Most pertinent to this article, the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a convergence of the efforts of those two major consortia, and of the IEEE.
