Solutions

Instructional Management Systems (IMS)

The Instructional Management Systems Project (IMS) (http://www.imsproject.org/) represents a consortium of government, academic and commercial organizations who are developing a set of specifications and prototype software for facilitating the growth and viability of distributed learning on the Internet. It was acknowledged by the meeting participants that any development in interoperable education in the GIS field should probably work within the IMS model since it appears to be the dominant model in higher education and one with which major educational institutions in North America and Europe are already aligning themselves. The IMS project provided a focus to much of the discussion of the meeting and set out most of the issues which must be addressed.
 
There are two main areas of work in IMS: the provision of a set of standards which will be published under IEEE and the testing of the standards and the delivery mechanisms through a prototype. Both areas are under way and parts of the standards are published in draft.
 
There are five main areas in which the project team is developing specifications and building prototype code:

• Metadata - descriptive information about learning resources for the purposes of finding, managing, and using these learning resources more effectively. The IMS metadata dictionary, a part of the metadata specification an expansion of the Dublin Core, is currently available and has defined an extensible number of fields and values for labeling learning materials. The IMS is also developing, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a process for managing the creation and evolution of metadata across different domains.
• Content - interfaces which define the actions and responses that IMS-compliant content may perform, including assessment, sequencing, reporting data, bookmarking, notification and metadata. This involves a consideration of system architecture and compliance with ActiveX/DCOM , JAVA/CORBA models and the use of HTML, XML and CGIs.
• Management Systems - functions such as access control, session management, tracking students' progress through learning processes, control over the virtual learning environment, and security.
• Profiles - of students and instructors that include personal, performance, and preference information.
• External Interfaces - to services external to the core management system such as electronic commerce, backoffice, full-text indexing systems, digital library services, and databases.

• how IMS addresses the issue of intellectual property
• how lineage is recorded in the metadata descriptions
• authentication and how rights of access and use will be managed
• the commerce model being developed to handle financial transactions
• how IMS may provide assurance of quality through the use of review bodies (a la Michelan stars), usage records and assessment of educational outcomes by external bodies.

• There is a need to separate content from infrastructure
• There is an acknowledged distinction between training and education. Can these share a common set of standards? Is all learning the same?
• There are several layers of interoperability needed: from technological (objects communicating) to semantics to institutional. Likewise, IMS is middleware in which technology is the foundation, policy and institutional matters is above this.
• Given the need for localization in geographic information science, how should learning profiles or educational settings be matched to metadata? Can we establish hierarchical schemas in metadata to address geographical or disciplinary foci?
• What is the appropriate level of granularity given the need for localization? Can we use nested hierarchies in metadata to address this? Can small objects be viable?
• IMS may provide the mechanisms needed to address the incentive problems.

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