LETSI's reason for being
Phillip Dodds passed away in late 2007. A few weeks after his death, many long time members and leaders in the evolution of SCORM gathered together in Washington, D.C. to talk about what should happen next with SCORM. I blogged about it at the time (http://www.aaronsilvers.com/2007/10/the-way-forward/ ), not because of what was decided, but because there was a chemistry among the participants – a renewed sense of purpose.
Many of the people who helped shepherd SCORM through its iterations also had a host of things they would like to be doing instead of staying within the scope of the purpose SCORM served. The obvious break from the past – the unfortunate passing of its architect and a turn in the relationship with IMS – presented an opportunity. The last year has been a very exciting time for many who are passionate about emerging technologies for learning.
It's in that spirit that LETSI has a cause beyond being a steward of a ten-year-old framework. It's tough to identify an existing group that crosses so many geographical regions and market boundaries (K-12, higher education, corporate job training) and that includes educators, technologists, vendors, and policy makers – as individuals – AND the associations that represent these stakeholders. LETSI believes that inclusive of today's education and training realities, its open participation model supports diversity – and that diversity leads to innovation through collaboration.
Knowing that anyone can participate in the community, and that LETSI openly welcomes individuals and organizations from every field and from every part of the world, LETSI is becoming a community of practice for learning technologists. Members have their eyes fixed on a more open and interoperable future, while their feet are firmly planted in the market and organizational realities of today.
Roughly 70 members of this community gathered in
- ADL will continue to develop SCORM 2004, providing a stable basis for the SCORM community.
- There is a need to support interoperability across systems that represent pedagogical, technological, and business models that are different from those supported today (including SCORM).
- LETSI will use agile software techniques and community-sourced software projects to facilitate more rapid and consistent adoption of software standards, while lowering barriers to innovation. (https://letsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=82&Itemid=95 )
How LETSI is different
I offer my perspective on how LETSI is different from IMS and from ADL. I hope you'll find there is a clear role for LETSI, and a critical need for LETSI to work closely with IMS and ADL going forward.
LETSI is aspirational
IMS' greatest strength has always been that it is a tight community of practice, focused on solving a certain set of problems in information technology. They've grown quite a bit since the 1990s, and as a result, they've matured as a specification body. IMS really knows how to crank out good specifications. They were very successful with Metadata. ISO is about to adopt Content Packaging (sometime soon ... I think ...). This makes putting a content package in a learning management system on par with plugging a 60w light bulb into a socket. It just works.
ADL's greatest strength was always that it could apply the specifications through research and development into solid technical examples and tools. SCORM is more than the reference books. ADL produced a conformance test suite and a sample run-time environment to demonstrate the implementation. This accelerated the ability for entrepreneurs, vendors, and developers to adopt the tools – they had working models they could measure their work against.
LETSI draws membership from a broad pool of passionate learning technologists, interested in solving interoperability issues across many domains – not just learning systems. The clearest distinction is the approach to the learning technology challenge of interoperability: IMS Common Cartridge solves a problem of how to transfer content across LMSs. LETSI's architectural plans solve the problems of transferring all data (not just content) across all systems (not just LMSs).
LETSI's architectural plans are progressing on several fronts, the most obvious being the SCORM API Web Services. There are currently three different teams modeling different Web service implementations of the SCORM Run-Time. The Web services act as a tunnel to expose content anywhere to a SCORM run-time – but one could expand the very same architecture to make use of many other APIs.
LETSI is a community
ADL is a recognized program under the Office of the Secretary of Defense, within the U.S. Department of Defense. There is a definite hierarchy assumed within ADL as a traditional organization. Even if you don't know who's who in the organization, it's easy for most people to imagine how ADL is structured.
IMS is a consortium. There's a cost to membership, and its works are made public with registration on their site, a perfectly acceptable means for the organization to understand who uses their work, and how it is used. IMS has a board and elected officers. IMS has a few full-time employees to help facilitate all the specifications advancing through their working groups. It's a strenuous effort to mediate arguments, to keep people (largely volunteers from competing organizations) focused on common goals, and to align documents to existing reference materials.
LETSI organizes with a different approach. There's no board. The obvious leaders within LETSI lead by doing. That ability for members, not sponsors, to direct is somewhat unique.
Since sponsors don't control LETSI's technical direction, LETSI is also different from IMS and ADL because of its chances for viability. LETSI lacks the need for a lot of overhead, but it takes funding to keep the community going. Why would sponsors invest in the organization if they can't directly influence it?
Once again, the diversity of LETSI's membership, and its open exchange of ideas, is inspiring another innovation: a "Pitchfest." The idea, born in a recent technical working group, was that LETSI will hold conferences attended by the broader LETSI community and potential sponsor organizations. The innovative ideas in the community would be presented; participants and sponsors would then align their activities to the idea under the guidelines that the work and process remain open. This allows a broader range of sponsors and members to work on innovations they are passionate about. Should the governance and the funding model of such an event emerge so that it is accessible to any interested parties, the chances of its success will improve dramatically – as well as its potential to grow into a model for funding other open-source initiatives.
LETSI is young
ADL and IMS, while very different types of organizations, are over ten years old. LETSI is barely over a year old. Its lack of maturity, its difficulty in being represented (or even understood) appropriately (even by its own members), and its changes in direction over the last year are serious challenges. LETSI must overcome these in the next year to be effective, let alone viable, going forward.
I understand why it's difficult to partner with an organization one doesn't understand, and therefore doesn't trust.
LETSI is still finding its stride. While the change from stewarding SCORM to looking over its horizon is, in my opinion, a very healthy change – it's one that's not been managed well. LETSI is a community that really does aim for openness and transparency, but its efforts (Web Services, for example) would benefit by consistent reporting and a way for the public to see how the effort is progressing in real-time. The same must be said for LETSI's architectural plans: there must exist a definitive statement that describes what LETSI's Architecture will look like.
Even if it's the wrong plan, LETSI will, at the very least, illustrate through its reasoning why the status quo of learning technology must change to accommodate emerging and unrecognized styles of learning. Being more agile is one benefit of youth. LETSI must be willing to visibly fail forward and innovate by example. The community has the talent to do it.
LETSI's ranks include people who work(ed) with ADL, and some who are or were members of IMS. Its members also include a lot of people who are not software engineers, chief learning officers, or vendors. Much of LETSI's membership includes people who implement e-Learning in some form, such as:
- People with various titles who use Articulate Presenter or Adobe Captivate to build learning content and are crafting it a step beyond what's out of the box;
- People who craft blended learning solutions using WebEx and Sharepoint because their LMS doesn't do everything they'd like it to do; and
- People who are designing role-plays and simulations using their organization's voice mail and e-mail systems to augment the reality of the workday with learning opportunities.
LETSI is a community for learning professionals who like to tinker, looking beyond what tools and media are available to what such things might be able to do.
These types of learning professionals tend to define the "better" (never "best") practices in all forms of e-Learning. They're the ones who reduce the time and cost of implementing technology so that the real investments can be made in competitive innovation instead of re-inventing the wheel.
Without disruptive change, there is little hope to realize the impact of technological innovation on education; particularly true for K-12 education. LETSI is poised to be an effective community of service in a space that heavily impacts how organizational learning, education, and training happen around the world – but LETSI must be viable in order to be reliable. For LETSI to be successful as a vehicle for such change, it needs to establish, maintain, and nurture meaningful liaison relationships with standards organizations and initiatives, producing and adopting standards of interest.
Will it be successful? If you’ll pardon the pun, “Let's see ...”
