Geoff Hendrick

The concept of a Trust Federation for the Australian education sector is a subject of lively debate and some activity.

The Australian Access Federation (AAF) is progressing from a testbed to production status. To date it has focused mainly on the needs of the Australian higher education (HE) sector.

There has been much discussion about a trust federation for the Australian School and Vocational Education & Training (VET) sectors and whether it should be the AAF or a separate (but interoperable) federation.

Two national online projects I have been involved with would be much enhanced if we had one (or more) national Schools/VET/HE trust federation(s).

The VET-sector Learning Object Repository Network (LORN) project aggregates the various state-based learning object (LO) repositories into a national service with the following benefits:

• teachers within state institutions can access a much larger nationally aggregated range of learning objects for use in their courses
• LO content developers in state institutions can see what has already been developed in other jurisdictions and avoid re-inventing LO’s
• LO owners can showcase (and sell) their LO’s to a national and international audience

To date LORN has been restricted to LO’s that the LO owners are willing to give away for free. But these organisations have many other LO’s that they would like to make available more widely on a commercial basis. Work is progressing on extending LORN with an online credit card payment facility for this purpose, but a trust federation would provide a much richer set of commercial arrangement options.

Within a trust federation, LORN could be enhanced to encourage LO providers (state institutions and others) to publish their commercial LO’s under secure access-controlled conditions. Example arrangements could be:

• Institutions A & B could agree to allow each other to access all their LO’s.
• Institution C might allow free access to its LO’s for all federation members but deny access to non-members.
• Publisher D could make its LO’s available to Institution E because they have an annual licence agreement
• Institution F could avoid unnecessary copyright fees because it can prove access to licenced materials by authorised users

In the Australian schools sector The Learning Federation (TLF) has developed a large range of high quality LO’s that are intended to be restricted to authorised school jurisdictions. In the absence of a suitable national school sector trust infrastructure, implementing these access control policies has added complexity and inconvenience to the project and (for some school jurisdictions) the intended beneficiaries: teachers and students.

Some have argued that Trust Federations in the education sector so far represent an institution-centric, overly complex (e.g. Shibboleth) view of the world. It has been suggested that we should take a leaf out of the Web 2.0 world and go for a more learner-centric, light weight (e.g. OpenID) approach.

Others have suggested that we should just make all learning materials feely available to all.

A rich subject area for future postings!