Geoff Hendrick

E-learning standards guru Jon Mason (who is now the editor for the JISC/DEST e-Framework project) organised a seminar on Friday 6Oct06 at the University of South Australia to promote awareness of ADL technologies such as SCORM and CORDRA.

Dan Rehack (who is now co-director of the WorkForce ADL Co-Lab in Memphis) gave the keynote “The 5 R’s of Workforce Training - Enabling Technologies for Scalable Solutions”. Dan described the global picture for workforce training and gave an overview of the role that ADL and other technologies are playing to deliver this promise. In particular Dan described:

• SCORM for shareble, reusable content
• CORDRA for discovery
• e-Framework as a reference model to aid technical interoperability

I presented on the subject of Federating Repositories in the Australian VTE Sector. This is a project that I have been involved in over the last 2 years. It is a good case study of a national-level pragmatic, low-cost, light-weight repository federation implementation that has been informed by standards such as SCORM, CORDRA, LOM, OAI-PMH and SRW/U. The VTE sector’s Learning Object Repository Network (LORN) project is a CORDRA-like federation of repositories.

Ian Reid from UniSA presented on institution-level implementation issues associated with Elearning within UniSA. He agreed that standards and scalability were important but challenged vendors to provide course creation and management systems that are sufficiently easy-to-use by non-technical teaching staff. He went on to describe how at UniSA they use a simple set of web-based wizards and templates for content creation.