Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998
Mark Resmer
Associate Vice President for Informational Technology
Sonoma State University
One of the themes that runs through many of the discussions of distributed learning and certainly through this panel is the blurring of distinctions between traditional higher education institutions and for-profit institutions.
One of the primary vehicles that has been in place over the last few years to provide a framework within which these kind of partnerships can develop is Educom's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII). Carol Twigg, the vice-president at Educom who heads up the NLII, invited me to come out here and talk to you about that. But I thought we might be better served in many ways by talking about a specific project within the NLII, which has become in fact very much the focus of the NLII, and try to draw some conclusions about what constitutes the nature of such partnerships since it, in fact, is a very good example of such a partnership. So this is really a presentation in two parts: A broader view of corporate partnerships with higher education institutions, and then much more of a down-to-earth view of some of the things we have been doing in the IMS (Instructional Management System) project. For the second part of my presentation today, then, I'd like to take you down a few more detailed paths within the IMS world and tell you a little bit about what we have done in areas that I think are potentially very germane in the library environment. (Note: The speaker's slides are attached.)
So what is Educom's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative? It was founded in 1994 by Carol Twigg with the realization that we really needed to find a large-scale national forum in which we could bring together a diverse range of constituencies and focus on the creation of student-centered learning environments. The name was selected based on the notion that we were busily creating a national information infrastructure, and that we really needed to focus on what we did with that infrastructure as it applied to learning. And so "Learning" is in many ways the key word of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative.
The basic premise that we have been working on is that the fundamental issue that confronts higher education today is how to find a way to enhance access and improve quality and yet, at the same time, contain costs. The premise here was that technology as applied to learning can, in fact, be a vehicle for accomplishing those outcomes. So it's a very top-level view of the NLII.
But the key point that I want to focus on regarding NLII is the partnership strategy. Our notion was to create a set of collaborative efforts and divide those into three key areas. One is creating a climate within which distributed learning and collaboration could take place. In order to do that, clearly we have to involve institutional leaders and public policymakers.
At the next level down, if you like, we need to create enterprise quality frameworks. We're very sensitive to the point that the previous speaker made about the unreliability of technology, about the fear and trepidation with which faculty face technology. It's something that needs to be overcome if we're actually going to create large-scale applications of technology that will really work. And so creating quality frameworks within which technology can play was very much a part of the mission, and the IMS project represents the key framework that has come out of the NLII.
Finally, frameworks and policies are great, but the rubber hits the road in the form of product. We use the word "product" very broadly; it includes educational services, courses, books, software, and all the various things that we use to actually create some kind of tangible outcome in the lives of our students and in the lives of our institutions.
So let me talk a little bit about the IMS project. The primary NLII partnership is the IMS project. We have been in existence now for a little over a year and the range of participating institutions is very large. On the one hand, we have institutions from the California State University and community college systems right up to major research universities and, indeed, foreign universities.
On the commercial side, our partners range from megatechnology companies--people like Microsoft, Apple--to service providers, major publishers, and a range of mixed companies that have either learning solutions or other particular products that make sense in the context of creating a framework for online learning. The one thing to note in addition is there's also government involved in this partnership in the form of the Department of Defense and the National Institute for Standards and Technology at the Department of Commerce.
What all of us are engaged in doing is creating an open architecture for online learning in which the vehicle for our vision of distributed learning can come to exist. The partnership model we used is an interesting one, and a very unusual one. We create products that are freely distributable. Yet all the partners have invested in this project. They have invested quite heavily. The minimum stake for any of these partners to come to the table is $50,000 a year, and many partners have actually invested significantly more than that in the project. Yet everything that the partnership creates is given away free. The value added is that the partners have a role in creating this common ground and have initial access to it before it's given away, so they can reap this value in terms of profit by implementing the specifications in their own products.
The approach we used is very much the way the Web got started. What it took to make the Web happen was a set of underlying standards like HTDM and HTML. But we also needed some implementation of those standards that were a giveaway, that people could use and understand and that served them well. That's really what got the Web started. What IMS is also doing, in addition to bringing out standards, is making available a freely distributable prototype that embodies them.
What have we learned from this partnership? Well, lots of things. It's been a great success to date. We are gathering new partners at an increasing rate. We have, in fact, recently released all of our specifications to the public. It's been largely regarded by all of the investors as a very good investment, and it's a good model for a partnership.
What worked and what didn't? One of the things that worked was that from the outset we had a partnership that was based on mutual goals. We wanted something out of this. We wanted a strong underlying technology. Commercial partners wanted to build products. We decided not to focus on the particular segments of either education or industry. We have both Microsoft and Microsoft's major competitors in this partnership. We have research universities and community colleges. In other words, it's good in this kind of partnership to create some internal tension and competition.
We decided we weren't going to create products. Partnerships are usually very poor at creating products. They are very good at creating what we call the common value space, something that everybody can use and that has value to them. We started very small and grew, which I think is really important. You hear a lot about large-scale partnerships that involve billions of dollars. Very often these are grandiose schemes that fall apart. So start small and grow, not grandiose and fail.
We run the partnership like a business, not like a consortium. We don't have any committees. There is a management fee. There is a board. If the board doesn't like what the management team is doing, they can fire us. But we do not take every single little decision to the board, and every single decision doesn't have to be a consensus decision. That is how we managed to make this partnership work.
We have hired professionals. We have a full-time staff of 14 now working on this project, all of whom are on the payroll and all of whom are fully committed to the project. In other words, these are not people who are finding spare time to volunteer their efforts. We do have a lot of volunteers from our various partners who have been coming in and helping, but the core staff of the project is a professional staff.
Finally, we make everyone invest. If you have no skin in the game, you simply won't be committed to the outcome. The $50,000 investment level was selected, by the way, not because we needed that much money, but because we felt it was an amount of money that would cause any company or institution to think seriously about making that investment and following through on it.
Now, let's dig a little deeper into our view of the world. We view it as being broken up into effectively two segments. There is a learning-teaching segment, and there's a coordinating-providing segment. The learning-teaching component is essentially those things done by individuals, instructors, and students. Coordinating-providing roles are the institution mediated things: What publishers do, what libraries do, what universities do, and what various kinds of institutional, organizational forums do.
I'll now specify as to how these entities have integrated with one another both between the different segments and as interchanges within any given constituency. What is the IMS environment? Well, we like to believe that the IMS system is at the center of the world. Others may disagree. We have various other things that constitute part of the world that we inhabit. There are collaboration groups, communication tools. There are various kinds of self-authoring tools. There are back office systems--things like student record systems and financial systems. There are libraries and library resources. And then there are the actual learning resources. There are, of course, teachers and students attached to all this. In addition, we recognize--this is very important--that not everyone throughout the world has continuous, high-demand Internet kind of activity, so clearly we need to reflect that people will occasionally be detached.
I now want to spend a couple of minutes focusing on two or three areas of the IMS specification map that are of particular interest to the library community. To give you an idea of the complete scope of what we have done, however, I encourage you to consult our website. We have done a lot of work in the area of metadata and in the area of profiles, both students and other individuals, in the use of online learning. There is a content specification which essentially focuses on how it is that learning materials behave and how they interact. Taking learning materials, breaking them down into small granules, and being able to reassemble and reuse them in various ways is what the content specification does. The management specification--the other half of the content specification--is the piece that deals with the question, "When you have content that plays by these rules, how do you manage it? How do you deal with issues such as security, authentication, payment, and so forth?"
Finally, we have specifications for interfaces to external services. The two that I want to focus on are the commerce and library interfaces. With that, let me elaborate a little bit as I think it's important to understand how we fit into the world of metadata.
We built our work on what is happening in the world with consortiums like RDF; we have also incorporated lock, stock, and barrel with the excellent work of the Dublin Core, which was the original group in the digital libraries community that created a metadata specification. We created, to supplement the Dublin Core work, a structure that enables the world's metadata to grow and be extended in a controlled and coherent way. That's one of our major contributions to this particular effort.
To give you an idea of how metadata looks, we have fields, very much like Dublin Core does, that have to do with basic attributes. That's the top level.
The middle level has to do with things that are specifically focused on learning, things like the level of learning: Is that a kindergarten tool or is it intended for graduate students? What are the learning objectives or learning outcomes? How long does it take to use? What kind of pedagogy does it involve? How is it structured? What level of interactivity does it have? How much is it intended to be mediated by an instructor or otherwise?
Thirdly, there is the business information that enables us to tag objects with their cost, information about who has the right to make business deals around them, and so forth. The notion here is obviously that, once you have this kind of structure, it enables people to find the right kind of objects. That's very key.
We have not had good strategies in the online learning space that correspond to the kind of strategies librarians have used for many years to effectively retrieve information. Typically, they are very crude tools, as we all know.
Our notion is, in addition to that core, we have a hierarchical structure for building communities of interest that can contribute specific terms and schemas that can be centrally introduced and made available to the rest of the world. For instance, if you're in the aviation industry, you probably care if you're dealing with an airbus or a 747. The rest of us really don't think there is a very important distinction. Or, in the math arena, there are all sorts of things that you might want to work with that are specific to math.
Another area that I'll cover briefly is profile specification. The whole notion is that this creates a learner-centered rather than information-centered view of the network, including bringing with it a large number of questions that revolve around the issues of privacy. Our answer to those are to say that the profile belongs to the student and is actually held by the student. It's like a wallet, or an educational résumé. In other words, it's not something that's managed and held by institutions. Institutions can place currency in that wallet; and they can be, if you like, authenticated just like the dollar bill in my wallet is authenticated by the Federal Government. So we look at the use of profiles that way rather than trying to create tremendous complexities around security and management of institutionally held information.
Finally, I wanted to say a little bit about some of the external interfaces, and this is actually a request to you all for participation in the project. We have a commerce interface that is being built for us by Brad Cox. Some of you may know him as the author of a recent book called Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1996), a book that I highly recommend for a view of how economics in the Internet age might work. He is actually implementing a superdistribution model as part of our work. This model enables all sorts of new ways of doing business. It can redefine what we mean by sampling, potentially providing new ways of creating opportunities for fair use and so forth.
The notion is that there is a meter in the background that ticks with microtransactions that happen, and there are various kinds of policies that can be applied to those meter readings. For example, you could have something available that costs a penny to use. And the vendor of the information says, "I don't want to bother collecting any money until the user has run up a dollar's worth of money on this thing." So the first 99 times it's used, it's free. The 100th time it is used, the user gets asked whether he or she wants to pay for it or not. The vendor takes the risk that the user could potentially say that he or she doesn't want to pay for it, and all those uses have been for free. But at that same time there's also a vehicle for them to collect money. So we are trying to break open the whole notion of how transactions happen so we can potentially be more responsive to the online needs of how money flows.
Finally, there's the library interface; this is something we haven't yet defined. We have had conversations with Cliff Lynch about this. Cliff, in fact, has informed me he was planning to issue a formal call through CNI for participation in this discussion. We have been looking at this basically as an analysis of what features would be needed along the lines of learning management systems and how such systems could interact with more traditional library research and resources. We firmly believe that this is an opportunity for the library community to create that interface with us, and I would certainly encourage any of you who are interested in doing that to do so within the context of CNI. The whole notion is of building a bridge between the library and the online learning worlds.
We are working with a number of other groups in the industry, basically any other standards effort that is out there. We have memoranda of understanding with them--or ongoing partnerships with them--so that we don't create ten different standards. That's clearly something none of us wants to see.
This is how our project works. We have the member investors that I mentioned. They provide us with funding and requirements. We have, of course, staff, who create two sets of things--specification codes in market development, and marketing systems that we have put together with test institutions and vendors that are interested in developing a product to our standards. At the same time, we are working with IEEE to take all the work that we have done and push it out into the formal standards arena and get it taken through an open standards process such that it has a life over and beyond the project.
If you're interested in learning more about NLII, you can visit the website at http://www.educause.edu/nlii/. If you're interested in learning more about the IMS project and its specifications, that site is located at http://www.imsproject.org/. Thank you very much.