There seems to be what I would describe as an elearning standards war looming: ADL recently announcing the Letsi initiative and SCORM 2.0 and late last week I got an email from IMS/GLC with a link to a FAQ about Common Cartridge.
Here is how IMS describe Common Cartridge in their FAQ:
“It’s a set of open standards, freely available and without royalty, developed by a global industry consortium with over 80 voting members. These standards, if followed by content developers and learning platforms, enable strict interoperability between content and systems. They also support great flexibility in the type of digital content supported (content can actually be applications) and where such content is located (content and applications in a Common Cartridge can be distributed)....”
(my bold formatting)
Sounds a bit like SCORM doesn’t it?
A while ago I was discussing the advent of Letsi with a friend of mine. He remarked - with some sarcasm - that one important point with a standard is that they shouldn’t change very often. This because the changes themselves lead to compatibility issues – something a standard is supposed to reduce.
Off course if a standard does not match the requirements of real life it makes sense to update it – or to create a new standard if the old one cannot be updated sensibly.
Now, I don’t know anymore about Common Cartridge than what is in the FAQ, and to me it does sound like it will solve some problems which are not currently addressed by ADL/SCORM.
I also like the international perspective of IMS, but I do think it is a shame that all efforts could not be joined in creating a robust learning standard for the future. (I smell politics behind this).
Not only because of the double effort, but more because there is a risk of splitting the elearning industry in two - like what happened in the “High definition optical disc format war” between Blu-ray and HD DVD. Until a winner of the elearning standards war emerges this could decrease customer confidence in elearning standards and slow down adoption of the new standards by vendors. I hope it doesn’t come to that, what do you think? Let me know by posting a comment below
Here is a link to the IMS Common Cartridge FAQ: http://www.imsglobal.org/cc/ccfaqs.html
And here is a link to “High definition optical disc format war” on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_definition_optical_disc_format_war