By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide
When one considers all of the changes the Internet offers in our lives-media, communications, sales, et al.-few rival the increasing importance of online learning or so-called E-learning. In the spirit of making all things digital that can be digital, education, particularly structured learning, is becoming a focal point in the development of Internet standards and technologies.
There are essentially two parts to online instruction: 1) the content itself, and 2) the technical environment that presents the content, monitors progress, and evaluates the user's learning of the content. The environment is the key here, as the content can be virtually any kind of structured course material; it is that environment that requires structure and consistency in order to ease adoption of E-learning systems.
Enter the ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) Initiative, established in 1997 by the Clinton administration, Department of Defense, and Department of Labor. This initiative was designed to create a framework allowing the government, academia and industry to work together in establishing online education standards. Such standards would allow all interested parties to develop online education systems more cheaply, more efficiently and ultimately allow easier interoperability.
The ADL initiative, after some initial stumbles and some debate with regard to the standards, ultimately endorsed an approach dubbed SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), which is essentially a set of standards for content aggregation, navigation, and run-time environment. Before you seek out your own e-learning module to explain all of these acronyms in greater technical detail, suffice it to say that this approach, now being widely adopted by e-learning vendors in the design of CD and online-based courseware, is making online education cheaper, easier to implement, and more effective as an education tool.
So, in our world of decaying classrooms, backbreaking levies, obsolete textbooks, and school schedules based on 19th-century agrarian schedules, how do we hope to keep up in an increasingly technical world? By the rapid adoption of these standards, and a movement in education to a distributed Internet-based model that is ultimately democratic, inexpensive, and likely to produce better results.
