Structured Methods

Perhaps nothing is more drawn out and aggravating for an IT organization than what I call “death by architecture.” The story goes like this: the high priests and architects depart for the ivory tower and return some months or years later with “The Revealed Truth,” in the form of 1,000 pages of architecture documents. In the meantime, new applications have been developed, requirements have changed, and the architecture is out of date on delivery. Other reasons may also contribute to its being DOA: It may be irrelevant to the development organization or might not have enough buy-in to be accepted. It may be hard to understand its value or how it achieves business goals, or dozens of other reasons.

In the twelve years of its existence, an awful lot has been learned about interoperability by IMS staff and members. This is nowhere more apparent than in the most quintessentially educational of interoperability standards: question and test items (QTI). A recent public spat about the IMS QTI specification provides an interesting contrast to two emerging views of how to achieve interoperability. Fortunately for QTI, they’re not incompatible with each other.

WHERE IS THE BEEF? This is certainly a common request from content developers I've heard for many years now. No, I'm not referring to burgers I'm sure you've heard of Wendy's famous catch phrase, but in case you haven't I'm unfortunately referring to there NOT being enough SCORM content examples available for reuse and sharing among the SCORM community. We have a technical specification (SCORM) that addresses the reuse and sharing of learning content, so wouldn't you'd think we would at least already had an abundant collection or repository of SCORM content examples that actually leverages the specification itself?