CHAPTER 5

Relevant Technology Standards and Specifications

Is your LMS accessible to people with physical or cognitive challenges? Is the system secure against hacking? Are you storing any potentially sensitive personal information about your users that must be kept private? Do you deliver self-paced e-learning courses through the LMS that must be tracked? Have you developed a lot of course and test content in your LMS that you would need to preserve if your organization were to change platforms? Do you use multiple systems to support your learning programs and need them to share a common set of data?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should be aware of the various technology standards and specifications relevant to learning management. There are interoperability standards for courses to work properly with an LMS and for the LMS to share data with other learning technologies; accessibility standards to enable the LMS to be used by people with visual, physical, auditory, and cognitive challenges; and standards for system security and data privacy.

LMS Interoperability Overview

There are two kinds of interoperability standards; the first is interoperability between courses and an LMS. These standards ensure that e-learning courses developed with tools outside the LMS work reliably when delivered through an LMS. The second is interoperability between learning systems. These standards allow different types of learning technologies, including the LMS, to share data.

Interoperability Between Courses and an LMS

Course-LMS interoperability standards help you publish, deliver, and track e-learning courseware in an LMS. They include AICC, SCORM, and cmi5. After you create your e-learning course, you export it to one of these standards, which provides a specification for how e-learning courses are installed on the LMS and how they communicate tracking data, such as pages visited, modules completed, and test scores, back to the LMS. Many corporate LMS and LCMS-LMS products support one or more of these standards.

Before interoperability standards existed, there was widespread frustration among organizations attempting to deliver e-learning programs. Courses purchased from different vendors required unique delivery platforms. In many situations, courses would only run on proprietary platforms provided by the course developer. If you had courseware from multiple vendors, you needed multiple platforms. Navigating multiple, disparate delivery platforms was difficult for learners and expensive for their organizations. Because courses from different vendors, who used different tools to create them, were incompatible, learning administrators couldn’t combine courses into a single curriculum or compile course results into a single report or transcript. Pushback from customers, combined with advances in technology, hastened the adoption of interoperability standards.

Interoperability standards address these problems by specifying how e-learning courses need to work, or interoperate, with an LMS. Interoperability provides such compelling benefits to the marketplace that it is in the best interest of course authoring tool vendors and LMS vendors to support these standards.

There are three main facets related to courseware-LMS interoperability: course deployment, course launching, and course data tracking.

These three facets of courseware-LMS interoperability have been incorporated into three major interoperability standards: AICC, SCORM, and cmi5.

AICC

AICC is the Aviation Industry CBT Committee standard for launching and tracking e-learning. While AICC is an older standard, some e-learning courseware is still AICC compliant, and many corporate LMS products support AICC. AICC was the first interoperability standard that enabled courses from multiple vendors to be run on a single LMS.

The AICC standard was first released in 1989 and last updated in 1998-99. The AICC specification’s original purpose was to get multimedia training content developed by multiple vendors using a variety of tools to work in a standardized way on PC hardware platforms in the years prior to widespread use of Microsoft Windows. Over the years, AICC evolved with changes to tools and technologies, and, ultimately, the introduction of learning management systems in the mid-1990s. The organization behind the AICC standard disbanded in 2014 after merging its work with that of other leading standards organizations. The AICC specification is an important precursor to newer interoperability standards.

SCORM

SCORM, or Sharable Content Object Reference Model, is the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) standard for publishing, launching, and tracking e-learning. ADL began as a joint project of the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Labor, with participation from industry and other interested parties.

The SCORM standard was derived, in part, from the older AICC standard, but incorporated later developments in web technology.

ADL released the first official version of SCORM, 1.0, in January 2000. It continued to improve and expand on the specification, with subsequent releases of 1.1 in January 2001 and 1.2 in October 2001.

The next version, SCORM 2004, was released in January 2004. This version improved on the specification’s support for more complex courses that contain multiple learning objectives separated into modules called shareable content objects, or SCOs. ADL released four editions of SCORM 2004. The final version was released in March 2009.

Through all its versions and improvements, SCORM has become, more or less, a turnkey solution for deploying, launching, and tracking courses through an LMS. Although earlier versions had some problems, with the later versions of SCORM, courses could be installed and run easily on any LMS that supported SCORM. This turnkey approach is very important to many course developers, who do not necessarily have advanced programming skills.

The SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 specifications continue to dominate the e-learning industry. Most standards-based courses, authoring tools, and corporate LMS products support these standards. However, web technologies have continued to evolve since 2009 along with a huge increase in the use of mobile devices, which are not supported with SCORM. These factors are rapidly bringing SCORM’s heyday to an end.

cmi5

Around the time the last version of SCORM was released, the standards bodies behind AICC and SCORM realized that the two standards needed to be reimagined. Both AICC and SCORM were focused on data tracking in the context of courses and could not be applied to more advanced learning and performance solutions such as performance support, knowledge management, expert networks, social media for learning, instructional games, simulations, immersive learning environments, and adaptive learning. Another key driver for the standards overhaul was the widespread use of mobile devices. The technologies underlying AICC and SCORM presented challenges to organizations that needed to track learning and performance data generated by mobile device users. These drivers led to the development of the Experience API (xAPI), which can be applied to track much more than course data and works well with mobile technologies. xAPI is much more than an interoperability standard. It provides a way to track data, not just from an LMS, but from lots of systems and applications.

Still, the need for improved courseware-LMS interoperability remained. To address this need, the AICC and ADL decided to cooperate on developing cmi5, which is an interoperability standard based on xAPI. The new specification, officially released in June 2016, is designed to do what SCORM does but in a new and improved way.

Like SCORM, cmi5 provides a turnkey approach to deploy, launch, and track online courses through an LMS. Some key advantages of cmi5 over SCORM are its ability to support mobile learning, track any type of course interaction, and eliminate the SCORM-generated pop-ups that often cause problems with pop-up blockers.

Because of these advantages, it is expected that organizations will, over time, develop cmi5 courses rather than SCORM, gradually displacing SCORM as the dominant interoperability standard between courses and the LMS.

Learning Systems Interoperability

Organizations of all types are becoming more sophisticated in their use of technology to deliver learning programs. Academic institutions are using not just an LMS, but also other educational software such as multimedia and video tools, online tutoring and assessment products, educational course materials, and digital books. Businesses, government agencies, and professional associations are using an LMS along with instructional games or simulations, knowledge management systems, performance support systems, social networking and collaboration tools, online communities, talent management systems, and workplace systems. The key question becomes, how can all these different types of systems share data related to learners, learning activities, and learning outcomes?

The need to use multiple software systems and applications from different manufacturers together in concert is not unique to the learning profession. In the IT world, this type of multisystem approach is called a service-oriented architecture (SOA). An SOA does not rely on any one vendor or product. It incorporates several networked technologies and platforms from multiple vendors, and it’s a lot easier to accomplish when all these systems support a common set of standards. In the learning field, there are two standards organizations addressing this challenge: the IMS Global Learning Consortium^® and the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.

With the exception of Open Badges, which is described later in this chapter, most of IMS Global’s learning systems interoperability standards are geared toward academic K-20 institutions. While many businesses use academic LMS products, they do not tend to use the other types of educational software products used by academia and therefore rarely use these standards. ADL’s learning systems interoperability standards are focused on any type of organization that needs to share, track, and store learning data from multiple systems.

IMS Global Learning Consortium Standards

The IMS Global Learning Consortium is a nonprofit organization with members representing K-20 institutions, educational technology providers, educational publishers, government, and professional consortia. The organization has established a collection of specifications to support storing data and content in a standardized way so that it can be moved between many of the leading software-based teaching tools and academic LMS products, reliably and easily.

Academic LMS products require their own kind of interoperability standard. Teachers and instructors who use academic LMS products spend a good deal of valuable time developing course materials, tests, and entire curricula. All that content is locked up inside the LMS, not to mention all of the student records from past and current classes. So what happens when an academic institution wants to switch to a different LMS product? How does it get all that valuable content and data out of the old LMS and into the new one?

If you are a teacher in K-12 or higher education, in addition to an LMS, you may also be using any of a wide variety of educational software products, such as multimedia and video tools, online tutoring and assessment products, off-the-shelf courses and course materials, and digital books. Many of these applications require the same student user accounts, user profiles, and learning history data as that stored in the LMS. Some of these applications generate results like grades and completions that need to be recorded in the LMS transcript. How can data be exchanged between these teaching tools and the LMS? How can the user experience be streamlined so the students don’t require multiple, separate logins to the LMS and every teaching tool you use?

The following sections describe eight IMS Global standards relevant to the LMS. The first seven can be found in many academic LMS products. The eighth, Open Badges, can be found in LMS products of all three types: academic, corporate, and LCMS-LMS.

Learning Tools Interoperability^® (LTI^®)

The IMS Global Learning Tools Interoperability standard allows for the exchange of data between academic LMS products and the content provided by many educational publishers, as well as a wide array of software-based teaching tools. More than 400 educational software products support the LTI standard.

Educational publishers continually update their content, so rather than packaging it up and delivering it to customers, many publishers prefer to maintain their content on their own servers and distribute it to customers over the cloud. Teachers may also use software-based teaching tools to create or assemble content, which must also be presented within the tool in which it was created. In both cases, the LMS must be able to launch the content and track students’ use of the content, but it does not actually host the content.

Let’s say you are teaching an online college course using an academic LMS. The course materials include interactive content licensed from an educational publisher and interactive exercises you developed using an online multimedia tool. The LMS, publisher’s cloud, and multimedia tool are all LTI compliant. LTI hyperlinks and descriptive information are installed on the LMS so that students can identify and launch the content residing in the publisher’s cloud and your multimedia tool. As students interact with the content, data are tracked in the cloud and outcomes such as grades or scores are sent back to the LMS. The work done by the LMS, content, and multimedia tool vendors to comply with the LTI specification establishes an out-of-the-box integration between their systems. In this way, LTI allows all the tools you’re using to work together seamlessly.

Question & Test Interoperability^® (QTI^®)

The IMS Global Question & Test Interoperability standard allows for the exchange of data about test items and student results between an academic LMS and other systems that provide assessment content and features.

Let’s say you have developed a dozen tests and quizzes in an online tool that your school licensed a few years ago. Students in all your classes have been taking these tests and quizzes. Recently, your school purchased an academic LMS, which supports the same testing features. The school has decided to discontinue licensing the previous product. Does this mean that you will lose the historic student results data? Will you have to redevelop all the tests and quizzes in the new LMS? If both systems are QTI compliant, the test items and student results can be moved from the old tool to the new LMS with relative ease.

OneRoster^®

The IMS Global OneRoster standard allows for the exchange of K-12 student profile data between a student information system and an academic LMS. Many K-12 schools use an SIS to keep track of each student’s identity, demographic information, and current grade level. Some of this information is also required in the LMS. OneRoster provides a specification for student data to be fed from the SIS to the LMS.

Learning Information Services (LIS)

The IMS Global Learning Information Services standard allows for the exchange of higher education student profile data between an SIS and an academic LMS. While LIS and OneRoster serve a similar purpose, LIS is more focused on the types of student data that are relevant to colleges and universities.

Common Cartridge^®

The IMS Global Common Cartridge standard provides a way to package learning content—a single content item or a collection—so that it can be exported from one system and imported into another. Common Cartridge specifies a standard way to aggregate and store the content in a single compressed (zipped) file that contains a manifest, or master index, that identifies the content and defines how it all works together. All systems that support the Common Cartridge standard can import content from the Common Cartridge format, but only some can export content to the Common Cartridge format.

Imagine that your school’s license term with its LMS is coming to an end. The school has decided not to renew the license and, instead, implement a new LMS product from a different vendor. You have lots of content in the old LMS, including documents, graphics, presentations, videos, whiteboard drawings, links to content and teaching tools in other systems, and assessments. You spent a lot of time in the old LMS tagging your courses and course materials with metadata pertaining to government curriculum standards. Naturally, you are concerned about how the transition of all this content from the old system to the new one will work out.

First, there have been several versions of the Common Cartridge standard released over the years, so you need to make sure that both LMS products support the same version. If they do, you’re in luck. You can export your content from the old LMS to a Common Cartridge format and import it into the new one. Then, you’ll be ready to continue with your real job: teaching.

Thin Common Cartridge^®

If the Common Cartridge is a barrel, the Thin Common Cartridge standard is a pint-size version. It supports a subset of what the Common Cartridge can do. If all you need to move between systems is LTI links (see the description of Learning Tools Interoperability earlier in this chapter), web links, and metadata, then the Thin Common Cartridge will suffice.

Caliper Analytics^®

Analytics are features that enable you to visualize and explore complex data patterns. Analytics should not be confused with reports. The reports produced by an LMS are useful, but they only supply you with data, as in lists of items that can be filtered and sorted. The purpose of reports is to provide you with a readout of the data that have been generated by LMS users. The purpose of analytics is to help you interpret and apply the data.

Data collected from multiple learning tools and systems can become confusing because of the differences in how data are labeled. What one system calls an answer, another might call a selection, and a third might call a response. When you collect these three pieces of data together into a single analytics tool, they appear as different fields even though they are really the same. For analytics to collect data on learning results from multiple systems, a common set of labels is needed.

The IMS Global Caliper Analytics specification provides a standardized method for labeling learning data and measuring learning activities. Software-based teaching tools and academic LMS products that support Caliper are guaranteed to use the same labels, as defined by Caliper, to describe their data. The standard ensures an “apples to apples” view of data from different systems so that you can analyze your complete learning data set in meaningful ways.

Systems that support Caliper have built-in sensors that collect learning activity data. Organizations using Caliper must establish an end point for the data; that is, a single database where the learning activity data are stored. Commercial analytics tools can then be used to visualize and analyze the data.

Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI)

Merit badges have been used by scouting programs for more than 100 years. With achievement comes recognition through a badge that you can sew onto your uniform like a military medal. Badges are used to set goals and motivate the development of new skills and knowledge.

Over the last decade or so, the video game industry has adopted this type of achievement system. Gamers earn points toward a badge, trophy, award, medal, or stamp. A game leaderboard displays the gamer’s position in relation to other players.

During that time, there has also been a good deal of research on the linkage between video games, badges, and education. In 2011, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory introduced an annual digital media and learning competition supported by the MacArthur Foundation to fund innovative badge systems and research studies for education.

Open Badges is a specification created in 2011 by Mozilla and a network of partners. Since that time, the standard has evolved, and the IMS Global Learning Consortium assumed management of the specification in 2017. Unlike other IMS Global standards, which are specific to the academic LMS, Open Badges is supported by many academic, corporate, and LCMS-LMS products.

Mozilla offers a Badge Backpack, which can be used by people to store badges they’ve earned based on the Open Badges specification. This allows people to take their badges with them from job to job, rather than the badges being locked inside the LMS.

Many LMS products can award badges to learners for completing a course or set of courses, for earning a given number of credits, or in a variety of other ways. If you are interested in using badges in your learning programs, ask your LMS vendor whether the product supports the Open Badges specification, and, if so, how badges are awarded and how they appear in the LMS course catalog and transcript.

Badges representing learning accomplishments and competency mastery may become increasingly important as more academic institutions move toward an evidence-based educational model.

Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative Standards

ADL recognizes that many corporate, government, and military organizations need to deliver formal, informal, blended, and workplace learning programs using not just the LMS but also other systems and applications. These learning programs could include content and activities requiring the use of:

• adaptive learning systems
• intelligent tutoring systems
• special purpose simulators
• virtual and augmented reality applications
• wearable technologies
• instructional games
• interactive e-books
• microlearning delivery systems
• knowledge management systems
• performance support systems
• online communities of practice
• analytics tools
• workplace systems.

What has been missing is a set of standards that allows all these systems to share learning-related data. Without these standards, different systems define, track, and store learning-related data, each in its own way, making it very difficult for designers to create learning programs that make cohesive use of multiple systems and applications.

To address the need for learning systems interoperability, ADL provides three key ingredients: the xAPI specification for tracking, processing, and storing learning-related data; the Competency and Skills System (CASS) open source software for managing competencies across multiple systems; and a vision for how to apply those standards, called a total learning architecture.

xAPI

By the mid- to late 2000s, the ADL realized that the SCORM specification was outdated and becoming too limited. SCORM can only track data generated by courses delivered through an LMS. It can only track basic things like page and module completions and test scores. The new reality is that people are learning in many ways outside the LMS—in social networks, online communities, help systems, instructional videos, e-books, mobile apps, and many other platforms. The question became, how can we track any type of learning activity regardless of whether it happens in a course, on an LMS, or anywhere else?

In 2008, the ADL, in collaboration with the Learning Education Training Systems Interoperability organization, engaged the learning and education community for ideas on how to modernize SCORM. In response, the e-learning community contributed more than 200 whitepapers containing a wealth of ideas.

The result is the xAPI specification, which was officially released in April 2013 and has gone through several minor updates since then. Some people still refer to it as Tin Can, the project name used during the specification’s development. This has led to a good deal of confusion in the field. Its true name is the Experience API, or xAPI for short.

The xAPI specification is based on the concept of tracking activity streams. This is a method used by many popular social media sites. An activity stream is, essentially, a log of the interactions a person has with a site or application, such as visiting a page, typing text, selecting an item from a list, or clicking a button. Activity streams are also able to track the context of each of these interactions. What text did the user type into which field on what page? An activity stream can also roll up a group of interactions into a higher-order activity, such as completing a form or participating in an online discussion.

For example, a social media site might use activity streams to track the topics people visit, along with their posts, replies, and likes. It can then use these data to identify things like the most popular content, the most active users, and topics of interest to specific users. It can even recommend things to users based on their activity data.

The activity stream approach is very flexible. It positions xAPI tracking to be applied in situations that go well beyond SCORM. The xAPI can be used to track data generated by informal workplace learning activities, social media interactions, milestones in games and simulations, and just about any other activity that you can observe or record.

There are three parts to any xAPI solution: activity providers, activity statements, and a learning record store. An activity provider can be any system, software, or app with which a person interacts. An activity statement is a software instruction built into the activity provider that is triggered by a user interaction and records what happened. An LRS, mentioned earlier, is the database that stores the data collected through activity statements. Let’s discuss each of these in more detail.

Activity Providers

An activity provider can be an online course, instructional game, simulation, performance support tool, form, video, knowledge base, social network, community of practice, discussion, search tool, website, portal, mobile app, e-book, or any other software you can think of. What makes something an activity provider is that xAPI activity statements have been programmed into it to record what users do, and it has been configured to connect with an LRS, where those user activities will be stored.

Activity Statements

One of the cleverest aspects of xAPI is the construction of the activity statement. Although activity statements are written as programming code, these same activity statements can be communicated by instructional designers to programmers using plain language. This approach enables instructional designers to design xAPI statements needed to track learning activities without knowing anything about programming. An activity statement comprises three parts: a noun, a verb, and an object, as shown in Figure 5-1.

Learning Record Store

A learning record store is where the resulting xAPI data are stored. It is essentially a database of activity data from all the activity providers with which it is connected. There are a number of commercially available and open source LRS products. A key advantage of the commercial products is the graphical reporting, analytics, and vendor consulting that come with them.

* * *

Let’s look at an example of xAPI in action:

Jane is a management trainee who has never written a project proposal. She has a new job where she will be writing lots of project proposals. She must get up to speed quickly so that her company gets new business as a result of the proposals she writes.

Jane’s manager is aware that the learning department offers a learning program for people in the organization with similar professional development needs. The learning program involves a combination of formal training and work assignments. It has been reported that 80 percent of employees who completed the learning program generated a winning proposal that earned revenue for the company, so Jane’s manager decides to use the learning program.

The learning program starts with formal learning, followed by a set of tasks that Jane completes with coaching from her manager. The company has directed the IT and L&D groups to work together to define and build xAPI statements into the coursework and the employee portal where Jane performs much of her work back on the job. These xAPI statements collect data related to Jane’s learning activities and record it in a learning record store. Table 5-1 lists the proposal-writing learning program’s xAPI statements. The activity provider is the system that generates the statement and reports it back to the LMS. The learning type column indicates the nature of the activity.

At any point, Jane’s manager can access a report from the LRS on Jane’s progress. After the first two activities, which are formal learning, the remaining statements reflect on-the-job work assignments, coaching, and accomplishments. The xAPI tracks all these statements. Jane was able to learn while producing work outputs and results. This blend of learning and working is a powerful model.

The xAPI specification is just a first piece of a larger ADL initiative called the total learning architecture. A paper resulting from a 2015-2017 ADL research project advocates “the concept of a modern ‘learning ecosystem’ comprised of interconnected learning opportunities, supported by technology, driven by data, and integrated with other talent management capabilities” (Gallagher et al. 2017).

CASS

ADL’s CASS project is open source software that enables multiple systems to share competencies.

Competencies describe the behaviors that are necessary for successful job performance. Let’s say your organization has a competency labeled teamwork. Four levels of proficiency have been defined for teamwork: novice, baseline, advanced, and expert. What does the teamwork competency look like at each of the proficiency levels? Table 5-2 shows an example of a proficiency scale for the teamwork competency.

These teamwork proficiency levels may be described even more specifically for different job contexts. For example, the observable teamwork behaviors for a sports organization are different from those at a nuclear power plant.

Talent management systems use competencies to create job descriptions, evaluate job applicants, match strategic goals to workforce capabilities, develop business leaders, and more. Corporate LMS products use competencies to create learning paths, identify courses to address competency gaps, and so on. The problem is that each system has its own way of handling competencies. Some have a single list of competencies, while others contain competency menus and submenus. In some, an individual either has a competency or doesn’t, while in others, a competency can be performed at different levels of proficiency. Some can describe a single competency in a variety of ways, based on the job or work context. These differences make competency data difficult to share across systems.

CASS solves these problems. It consists of three components: competency portability, competency reporting, and resource alignment. As CASS development matures, LMS products and other learning systems may take advantage of its capabilities by embedding or providing an out-of-the-box integration with the CASS software.

Competency Portability

Competency portability allows multiple systems, including an LMS, to share competencies even if the competency structures differ. It does this by providing a method to associate competencies in one model with competencies in another. A competency in one system can be identified as “the same as” or “related to” a competency in another system. Rubrics can be configured to determine whether several detailed competencies are equivalent to a single higher-level competency or whether having a higher-level competency means that you also have lower-level competencies. If the systems you are using do not have competencies at all, you can use CASS as a competency repository that other systems can access.

Competency Reporting

Competency reporting allows you to define “assertions” that a person has a competency. An assertion can be a certificate or badge, sign-off by an authorized observer or supervisor, or a set of xAPI statements that provide evidence of a person’s competency. A competency assertion can be configured to expire after a specified amount of time. For example, competence at administering CPR may need to be reinforced, refreshed, and reasserted periodically. A competency assertion can also be configured to decay over a given timeframe. For example, competency at marathon running may decay without maintaining good health and proper physical conditioning. An assertion can be limited by certain conditions. For example, competency at driving an automobile safely may be asserted for fair and mildly inclement weather, but not for torrential rain or snowstorm conditions.

Resource Alignment

Resource alignment is the association between a piece of content and a competency. Each competency-content association has a set of properties that name and describe the content, the learning program to which the content belongs, the URL to access the content, and an alignment type, which indicates whether the content assesses, teaches, or requires the competency.

Total Learning Architecture

The total learning architecture is a vision for how ADL standards can be applied to liberate learning design from the constraint of traditional courses and move beyond the LMS to incorporate multiple systems and applications in the learning experience.

The vision includes four types of data that systems will need to share in support of learning: learning evidence, competencies, learning context, and learner profiles.

Learning Evidence

Learning evidence proves that a person learned something they didn’t know before (a learning outcome) or can do something they couldn’t do before (a performance outcome). A traditional course may provide evidence of a learning outcome in the form of a passing test score. ADL’s vision allows for many more ways to collect learning evidence. For example, the subject completed all the steps in the proper order, performed a task or procedure within a specific amount of time, delivered a work product, was observed performing effectively, received supervisor sign-off on a specific deliverable or accomplishment, or some combination of these.

After an instructional designer identifies the intended learning and performance outcomes for a learning program, they must determine what, how, when, and from where to collect evidence of those outcomes. Due to its flexible and open structure, xAPI can be used to track evidence of learning and performance, whether it happens in the LMS or in another system or application.

Competencies

As mentioned earlier, competencies describe the behaviors that are necessary for successful job performance. Organizations use competencies to describe what is required to be effective in a job role or work assignment, allowing them to assess a person’s current competencies and competency gaps. Learning programs can focus on the participant’s acquisition of specific competencies. This approach has potential for developing employees in ways that benefit the organization strategically.

The ADL CASS specification can be used to link different systems to a common set of competencies, keep track of associations between competencies and learning content, and define the learning evidence that asserts a person has acquired a competency.

Learning Context

In ADL’s vision for a total learning architecture, learning context data will enable learning systems to detect information about a learner for use in recommending and personalizing learning content. This may include situational information about how the user is accessing the content, such as the time of day, location, device used, and connection type; user profile information, such as the user’s job, preferred language, and preferred delivery method; and user history information, such as learning credits, certifications, badges, and competency assertions. Future ADL standards will support this approach.

Learner Profiles

Learner profiles include the kind of information you might find in any system’s user profile, but the ADL vision goes a step further. In the total learning architecture, learner profiles will list the competencies a user has and those the user needs based on the learning context. This information can be used to develop and monitor progress in personalized development plans.

The ADL standards allow for a more engaging, relevant, and personalized user experience. For the learner, these specifications will enable personal learning and development achievements and records to be taken from one school or employer to another. For the instructional designer, these specifications promise to liberate learning design by enabling designers to incorporate multiple technologies into a learning program, knowing that the relevant data are shared and accumulated across platforms. For the chief learning officer, the notion that the LMS is the central and sole repository for what is now a relatively limited set of course-specific learning data will give way to a more comprehensive set of learning data that are stored in a way that can be shared across many systems.

Accessibility

Now that we’ve covered interoperability standards, let’s move on to another standard that is important to the LMS: accessibility.

A system’s compliance with accessibility standards is important to all organizations, and it is the law for many government agencies. Accessibility standards make software applications usable to more people with visual, physical, auditory, and cognitive challenges. These standards work in conjunction with assistive devices such as screen readers, voice control, and switch controls.

Many people with visual challenges or blindness rely on screen readers to use software. A screen reader recites the text and interaction options on the page. For a screen reader to make any sense of pictures, photos, icons, logos, and other graphics, the images must include a descriptive text-based label. Image labels can be entered in HTML, but many times software developers, who may not be aware of their value to screen readers, don’t enter them.

Another visual challenge involves color blindness. Designers who use color to organize information or interactions should simultaneously use other methods and not rely on color alone.

In addition, many people unable to use a mouse or joystick due to visual, physical, or cognitive limitations often use a voice control or switch control that emulates a keyboard. For software to support these controls, keystroke alternatives to “mousing” must be available.

The two most prevalent accessibility standards are Section 508 of the U.S. government’s Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to make digital systems and information accessible to employees and citizens with disabilities, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by the international Internet standards organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3).

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

The initial version of the standard, WCAG 1.0, was first published in 1999. The current version is WCAG 2.0, published in 2008. It includes 12 guidelines, each with a set of criteria that can be tested to ensure compliance. WC3 has also published a set of techniques that web designers and developers can use to apply the guidelines.

In 2012, WCAG 2.0 was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization and published as ISO/IEC 40500:2012.

If you are interested in testing the accessibility compliance of your LMS, there are a number of third-party organizations that offer WCAG 2.0 audits and site reports.

Section 508

In the United States, legislation to prevent discrimination against people with disabilities in the federal workforce dates back to the end of World War I. Over the years, the legislation evolved in many positive ways until the 1960s, when it was expanded beyond people with physical and mental disabilities to provide assistance to a broader range of people who had trouble finding jobs due to things like alcoholism, drug abuse, and serving time in jail. This expansion arguably made the legislation untenable, too broad-based and complex for compliance and enforcement to be managed.

In 1973, the United States introduced an entirely new Rehabilitation Act focused on protecting the rights of and preventing discrimination against people with physical and mental disabilities who wanted to work in federal jobs, for federally funded programs, and in jobs with federal contractors. In the years since its introduction, the Rehabilitation Act has been amended to address issues people with disabilities face beyond employment, such as community inclusion and consumer protections.

Section 508 was enacted in a 1998 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It mandates that all information technology developed and used by the federal government be accessible to people with disabilities. While there is no official certification of Section 508 compliance, some private organizations and trade associations provide product accessibility templates to assist software vendors in assessing the compliance of their products.

Security and Privacy

In any data system, security and privacy are two separate but related issues. Security is focused on preventing unauthorized access to a system and its data. The ability for a hacker to access a system and steal its data results from a problem with the system’s security. To secure a system, you or your vendor must configure a number of system parameters that protect access to the system and its data.

Privacy is focused on how the user data collected in a system are used. A company that shares the contact information and buying habits of its customers with other companies is not keeping its customer data private. To protect the privacy of your users, you must establish, communicate, and enforce a policy on how the data collected in the system will be used.

Standard Security Controls

To keep a system secure, you must require users to log in and be authenticated before they can access the system’s data and features. After login, the specific features and data that each user can access are controlled by roles and permissions. Make sure there are no potential back doors into the system.

Sensitive data such as passwords or credit card information must be encrypted if they are stored in the system’s database. Better yet, avoid the permanent storage of credit card information and instead require users to enter the information each time they pay for a course.

To protect sensitive data when they are transmitted from the user to the LMS through the Internet, the data should be encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer. When data transmission is secured, the user will see https:// instead of http:// in the LMS web address.

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) comprises standards groups from more than 160 nations. ISO standards contain clear criteria that can be proven and certified. While many LMS vendors have not been ISO certified, those that are instill in their customers a greater sense of confidence. Some organizations even require that their information system providers be ISO certified. Ask your LMS vendor whether they are certified in the following ISO standards.

ISO 27001

LMS vendors operating in the cloud and third-party hosting services are ultimately responsible for the security of your data. This ISO standard specifies what is required for a hosting provider to establish and maintain a systematic approach to managing information security.

ISO 9001

ISO 9001 is a widely adopted standard that specifies what is required for establishing and maintaining a systematic approach to managing quality. If your vendor is ISO 9001 certified, you can be confident that your LMS meets the needs of its customers while also complying with statutory and regulatory requirements.

Government Agency Security Controls

Government agencies using an LMS may have additional security requirements. In the United States, the security of systems used by federal government employees is governed by the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) of 2002. Security requirements for cloud-based solutions may need to be certified through the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which assigns a security impact level of low, moderate, or high to the LMS and uses specific tests to measure whether it meets the criteria of its assigned impact level. LMS implementations in the U.S. Department of Defense may need to be certified in the DoD Information Assurance Certification and Accreditation Process (DIACAP) to ensure system security risks are managed appropriately.

No matter where you are in the world, if you’re responsible for a government agency’s LMS, check with your vendor to determine what experience they have with other customers in your country’s government and if they have already been through the required security certification processes.

Country-Specific Privacy Laws

Be sure your LMS is compliant with the privacy laws of the countries in which your users are located. Some countries have established strict laws related to data privacy. Failure to comply with these laws can result in penalties. For example, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China has issued cybersecurity laws that address data privacy; France has long-standing data protection laws that are enforced by the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés; Germany’s Bundesdatenschutzgesetz regulates personal data in information technology systems; and in Sweden, the Electronic Communications Act and Personal Data Act regulate data privacy. Check with your IT organization and legal department for guidance on what you need to consider, and then work with your LMS vendor to make sure the LMS is configured to comply with the data privacy laws of the countries in which your organization operates.

Key Takeaways

This chapter explained the various standards and specifications used to make your content and corporate or academic LMS work well together; ensure your system is accessible to people with visual, physical, auditory, and cognitive challenges; keep your system secure; and maintain the privacy of your user’s data. The key takeaways are:

• Three corporate LMS interoperability specifications ensure your e-learning courseware works properly with your LMS: AICC, SCORM, and cmi5.
• A collection of academic LMS interoperability specifications ensures your online content, teaching tools, and LMS can exchange data: Learning Tools Interoperability, Question & Test Interoperability, OneRoster, Learning Information Services, Common Cartridge, Thin Common Cartridge, Caliper Analytics, and Open Badges.
• Three standards support data sharing among the various learning technologies, including the LMS, used in business, government, and professional associations: the xAPI specification, the Competency and Skills System, and the vision for a total learning architecture.
• Accessibility standards like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 work with assistive devices to make software applications usable to more people with visual, physical, auditory, and cognitive challenges.
• Security and data privacy are key concerns for any information system, including your LMS.

This concludes part 1, which was focused on explaining the various types of LMS products and their features, relevant standards, and specifications. Part 2 focuses on how to select, implement, and operate an LMS.