The Instructional
Management Systems Cooperative: Converting Random Acts of Progress into
Global Progress
by William H. Graves
The Basic IMS
Concept and Its Context
Five
years ago when we organized and rolled out what is now the EDUCAUSE
National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII), two exciting instructional
technology tracks had barely begun to intersect.1 Advances
in microcomputer-based multimedia technology had enabled the development
of media-rich, interactive learning materials in the stand-alone medium
of the microcomputer with a CD-ROM drive. In a separate but parallel
track, the introduction of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the
HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and the Web browser had made it possible
to deliver learning materials for "anytime, anyplace" study by students
who had access to an Internet-connected microcomputer and a Web browser.
Similarly, Internet-based e-mail (and lists) were enabling "anytime,
anyplace" communications within learning communities of students and
instructors.
The Internet and
its Web protocol (HTTP) were promising to resolve the distribution and
revision bottlenecks inherent in providing instruction through CD-ROMs
and floppy disks -- and books. And the Web browser, supporting HTTP
and HTML, was becoming a standard for gaining access to learning materials
"published" on the Web using HTML tags, obviating the need for students
to have any software more specialized than a Web browser. But the Web
was not then, and still is not, as rich as the stand-alone multimedia
microcomputer environment in the potential to focus the full range of
human senses on decisions and actions that lead to learning.
Some nevertheless
thought that a national learning infrastructure would inevitably emerge
with the commercial evolution of the Web. The Web, they argued, would
surely become a more interactive, media-rich environment in which innovative
instructors would "author" Web-based courses richer and more immersive
than any collection of linked HTML files. They were partly right. Technologies
such as Java now hold this promise, but their broad educational potential
has yet to be realized. Progress to date owes mostly to the work of
individual instructors using a variety of technologies that either do
not scale or have not met with the universal acceptance accorded HTTP
and HTML. Indeed, progress thus far might best be described as random
acts of progress. The larger purpose of the EDUCAUSE Instructional
Management Systems (IMS) Cooperative is to channel the necessary bottom-up
innovation and progress into national and global progress that can be
understood and supported from the top down. 2
Not only is there
not much evidence of a national or global "educational object economy"
on the Internet, but only a few institutions can claim to have created
a coherent institutional environment for instruction on the Internet.
Many are delivering courses on the Web and/or enhancing traditional
classroom courses with Web components. But seldom do these efforts scale
to the institutional level or, in the aggregate, add up to an institutional
program. They certainly do not constitute a national and global learning
infrastructure that takes into account the need for both freedom of
choice and broadly accepted (de facto) technical standards, as a means
to stimulate the development of those choices.
For an analogy,
imagine how much more unfriendly the skies would be if
- every airline
had to build its own airport in each market it wanted to serve,
- travel agents
had to master a different ticketing system for each airline, and
- there were no
agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), or protocols
to route air traffic and ensure safety in the air and at the airport.
Although it is
far from perfect, there is a national air transportation system, part
formally developed and part informally evolved, that balances the interests
of airlines, airplane manufacturers and other industry suppliers, pilots
and other industry employees, airport authorities, travel agents, and
passengers. This national system is held together not by a single standards
or regulatory agency such as the FAA but by negotiations and contracts
between the FAA, the National Air Transportation Safety Board, the Federal
Trade Commission, pilot and other employee unions, airlines, travel
agencies, and industry constructs such as code-sharing (precompetitive)
partnerships among airlines. Our national air transportation system
is part of a loosely coupled global system. Both systems have many "moving
parts" and yet accommodate iterative changes to reflect new developments.
The IMS Cooperative
is trying to accomplish a similar balancing feat to provide synchronizing,
technical leverage for the forward-looking initiatives of all stakeholders
in education and training. At stake are the interests of
- organizations
that sponsor and deliver instruction and/or certify its outcomes,
- educational policy
and standards bodies,
- instructors,
- developers of
instructional resources,
- commercial and
noncommercial providers of instructional resources and other suppliers
to the education and training "industry,"
- learners, and
- the commercial
and societal groups that expect some form of quality assurance in
the education and training marketplace.
As in the friendly
skies, there are many "moving parts." Those who believe that the IMS
Cooperative is about a single piece of instructional management code
or a single functional standard for instructional management systems
are off base. The IMS Cooperative is trying to build the "Internet architecture
for learning." An architecture requires a blueprint that conforms to
a set of building codes. The IMS Cooperative gathers ideas about what
kind of functionality will be needed in the online components of a global
learning infrastructure. The IMS technical team then designs and vets
technical specifications to support that functionality, with the ultimate
goal of facilitating the acquisition of component parts from a range
of suppliers in the educational value chain of nonprofit and commercial
interests. These technical specifications are the IMS candidates for
industry-wide de facto standards that will enable different software
technologies in the various online instructional infrastructure and
application layers to exchange information and otherwise to interoperate.
They are offered publicly as de facto standards for interoperability
among learning systems, management systems, content, and discourse.
The intent is to promote broad adherence to the open IMS specifications.
If any become formal standards, so much the better.
The Challenges
Inherent in the IMS Concept
There are many
reasons why progress toward a global learning infrastructure has not
been systemic. And many of these reasons illustrate both the need for
and the complexity of the IMS agenda. Here are some examples.
A Student's
Education Involves More Than a Single Course and Instructor
An education is
earned by successfully navigating multiple learning events, typically
organized as courses and orchestrated by different instructors working
in complex organizational settings. These settings are sometimes interinstitutional
-- as is often the case when the context is "K-grave" lifelong learning.
In this broader view of what constitutes a formal education, little
institutional and interinstitutional progress has been made in using
online technologies to enhance the instructional process and to record
the learning accomplishments that should be its goal. We initiated the
IMS Cooperative to encourage the coherence of pockets of progress into
a systemic global learning infrastructure. Initially focused on higher
education, we envisioned a future in which postsecondary students would
select their educational opportunities in a competitive education marketplace.
Students would have choices as they tried to balance a variety of individual
educational requirements, including, especially, individual requirements
for convenience and quality. This open education marketplace would be
defined by thousands of competing offerings that would aggregate the
work of expert content organizers and learning mentors (instructors),
content authors and publishers, and providers of education and educational
infrastructure (institutions). The IMS specifications can be the technical
glue that will integrate these components, to the mutual benefit of
the student, the instructors, the institutions, and the companies involved
in a student's education.
A Course
Is More Than Content
Even when the acquisition
of "content" is designed on the constructivist model to engage multiple
senses and learning styles -- as with exploratory multimedia learningware
-- most students need the guidance of an instructor. Instructors help
learners acquire knowledge and assimilate that new knowledge in the
larger context of a coherent body of knowledge that constitutes a "way
of knowing": a curriculum, a liberal education, the scientific method,
a body of professional knowledge and skills, or other educational constructs.
Instructors accordingly are responsible for much more than the delivery
of content, and the IMS specifications offer the prospect of seamless
technical integration for instructors who use a variety of technologies
to amplify their effectiveness and efficiency as they fulfill their
responsibilities in the instructional process. Those responsibilities
include the following:
- Select and sequence
the content to be studied
- Organize discussions
and other class group activities to encourage and facilitate collaborative
learning
- Guide students'
self-study
- advise, tutor,
and assign readings, papers, projects, etc.
- Critique and
measure (grade) students' individual progress
- Manage and report
students' progress within an institutional or interinstitutional process
that leads to the certification of students' individual accomplishments
Content Is
More Than Lecture Notes
The textbook has
long been a mainstay of instruction. It is used by instructors to organize
a course of study and to provide students with material for self-study.
Few instructors are textbook authors. Instead, most instructors select
a textbook and prepare syllabi and lecture notes to reorganize and supplement
that textbook with their insights and expertise. Because syllabi and
lecture notes can easily be published on the Web, we tend to confuse
that act with the electronic equivalent of authoring and publishing
a textbook. But the posting of syllabi and notes on the Web usually
happens without the peer review and professional editing associated
with the publication of a textbook. The true technology-enhanced counterpart
to the textbook is, instead, learningware -- carefully designed
and reviewed interactive software environments that organize and deliver
not only knowledge but the means to participate actively in the creation
of knowledge through simulations, modeling, tutoring, and the like.
There is as yet no significant higher education marketplace in learningware.
Moreover, instructors and their institutions are no more likely to succeed
in the business of creating reusable, nationally or globally reviewed
learningware than they would be if together they organized a business
for refining class notes into published textbooks to compete against
commercial publishers in the textbook market. The IMS specifications
can help create a sorely needed commercial infrastructure for developing,
selling, and distributing learningware that can be used interchangeably
in a global learning infrastructure.
Convenience
Is Important for Both Students and Instructors
Students who seek
educational opportunities at a distance often raise a variety of convenience
issues. Is communication primarily asynchronous, or are there requirements
for real-time class participation or location-based participation? Can
admission and registration, academic advising, book purchases, library
research, or assignment submission be accomplished online? These are
issues mostly of convenience, not of distance. Even students who seek
a residential educational experience often enroll in Web-based courses
or utilize online administrative and student services for reasons of
convenience. Whatever the context, online communication, study materials,
and instructional processes will not be perceived as convenient unless
they are seamlessly woven together to obviate the need for multiple
application interfaces and navigational rules that vary significantly
from course to course, department to department, and institution to
institution. Moreover, instructors who do not count themselves among
the early adopters of technology-enhanced instructional methods are
not likely to participate in online educational environments unless
it is convenient to do so -- or they are forced to do so. The IMS specifications
can make the Internet a convenient medium in which to conduct education
and training -- from the perspective of all the stakeholders involved.
When There
Are Many Moving Parts, Quality Assurance Is Difficult
The considerations
described above reveal that there are many moving parts in the instructional
environment with its many stakeholders -- learners, instructors, authors,
publishers, institutions, and the external commercial and societal beneficiaries
of education and training. As with the friendly skies, there must be
ways to monitor and negotiate the overall quality of the enterprise.
The IMS Cooperative is working to ensure interoperability and competition
within the enterprise and thus choice in the value chain of developing,
purchasing, delivering, and certifying education and training. Choice
permits the exercise of judgment and provides a framework for pursuing
and negotiating quality assurance from a variety of perspectives.
The Status and
Future of the IMS Effort
The IMS Cooperative
was created in early 1997 to succeed (or fail) over a three-year period.
Success was defined as attracting enough investment members to
craft and openly publish technical specifications that, near the end
of the three-year period, would be the technical foundation for a host
of product and service development efforts from within the IMS Cooperative
and from other interested parties. The IMS Cooperative quickly attracted
investment members, over thirty by early 1999. Those members have funded
the excellent work of a full-time staff and have contributed critical
expertise and other forms of in-kind support.
The IMS staff has
organized the collection of requirements and has facilitated the attendant
process of developing technical specifications for the "Internet architecture
for learning." By the end of 1998, almost two years into the effort,
success appeared much more likely than not. Thus began a process for
securing the future evolution, promotion, and maintenance of the IMS
specifications. To understand this future, we must understand the current
organizational structure of the IMS Cooperative. And that brings us
back to the host organization for the IMS effort: EDUCAUSE.
The EDUCAUSE NLII
was designed to advance systemic thinking and action on the uses of
network technology in higher education to
- increase access
to instruction,
- improve the quality
of the outcomes
- the learning
accomplishments
- of instruction,
and
- increase return
on investment in instruction from the perspective of all of its stakeholders.
To advance these
key goals, the NLII serves as a neutral incubator for ideas, actions,
and products developed by member organizations and others with a stake
in higher education. The NLII is led by an EDUCAUSE vice-president,
is advised by a Planning Committee, and is staffed for facilitation,
not for implementation. The NLII accordingly facilitates an RFP (request
for partners) process to promote common-good collaboration among participating
organizations. The IMS Cooperative is the distillation of several RFPs
with similar agendas. The common agenda identified a necessary technical
dimension to any attempt to convert random acts of progress on the instructional
technology front into national and global progress. It recognized the
complexity of using the Internet as a medium in the instructional process.
It recognized that a broadly shared technical framework could encourage
the development of a robust, open market of interchangeable technology-enhanced
products and services -- a flexible, integrative foundation for taking
advantage of the Internet in all aspects of the development, delivery,
and management of instruction, its content, its human interactions,
its learning accomplishments, and its records.
The IMS Cooperative
thus was conceived in the context of EDUCAUSE's institutional membership
base in higher education and has operated for over two years under the
legal and financial aegis of EDUCAUSE. But this hosting arrangement
was never viewed as necessarily permanent. Two aspects of the current
hosting situation reveal the kind of issues now surfacing:
- To succeed in
becoming the "Internet architecture for learning," the IMS specifications
must be adopted in significant education and training markets external
to higher education -- notably, in the public-school sector and in
corporate and government education and training markets. Indeed, many
of the current investment members of the IMS Cooperative are from
or operate in these other markets and believe that IMS organizational
and governance structures should reflect their interests, as well
as those of higher education.
- Under the current
arrangement, the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors has ultimate legal responsibility
for the IMS Cooperative. Many investment members, in light of their
financial stakes through IMS dues and, more significantly, their large
investments in product development, have argued for a governance structure
that unambiguously places ultimate responsibility with those organizations
that agree to fund the IMS Cooperative with significant contributions
in cash to sustain a staff and its organizing, facilitative, and promotional
work into the future.
A working group
of the IMS Advisory Board recently formulated some future IMS scenarios.
After considering these, the Advisory Board formed an IMS Transition
Team to create or find a new nonprofit organization as the future base
for IMS activities.
The new IMS organization
would be governed by a board of directors composed, in the majority,
of directors elected from and by the membership -- those individuals
who on a one-to-one basis represent the commercial and nonprofit organizations
that choose to pay an annual membership fee. Membership fees would be
structured both to promote membership and to meet the estimated financial
needs of the new organization. The new IMS organization would have several
fundamental responsibilities:
- Be responsive
to the needs of both developers and customers of products and services
that conform to the IMS specifications
- Develop and operate
formal, representative mechanisms for gathering functional and technical
requirements from key education and training communities, especially
from the
higher education community,
the public-school sector, and
the corporate and government education and training sector
- Staff and facilitate
a neutral, precompetitive technical-specifications development process
in which any member organization can actively participate in the formulation
or revision of any IMS specification before its public dissemination
- Promote the adoption
of the IMS specifications through market development activities; these
activities should include working with standards bodies, when appropriate,
and organizing a developers' support mechanism open to any organization
willing to develop or use products that conform to the IMS specifications
-- the idea behind the current IMS Developers' Network
Conclusion
EDUCAUSE's three-year
IMS Cooperative effort has succeeded in the most difficult of endeavors
-- facilitating progress toward a common goal shared by a group of diverse
organizations, each with its own overriding interests to protect and
advance. Ensuring the ultimate, sustainable success of the effort will
require a transition to a new organizational and governance construct
and educationally representative agenda. That new construct and agenda
will have to recognize the key role of companies' investments in IMS-compliant
commercial products and services while also providing a formal mechanism
to ensure that those products and services are informed by the needs
of customers -- from higher education, the public schools, and the corporate
and government education and training markets. By the time this article
appears, more details about the new IMS organization should be available
on the Web at http://www.imsproject.org/.
You can help advance
the next-phase IMS effort by encouraging organizations that will benefit
from a sustainable IMS construct to participate as fee-paying members.
Endnotes
1. Dr. Robert Heterick,
in his role as president of Educom, invited Dr. Carol Twigg and the
author to collaborate with him, under Educom's sponsorship, to conceive
and roll out the Educom National Learning Infrastructure Initiative.
Twigg subsequently joined Educom as a vice-president to lead the initiative.
The author continues to chair the Planning Committee for the initiative,
which is now led by EDUCAUSE Vice-President Dr. Carole Barone.
2. The IMS Cooperative
is a project of the NLII. A wealth of information and a formal statement
of IMS goals and objectives are online at http:/www.imsproject.org/.
Dr. Graves is Chairman
and Founder of eduprise.com, a recently formed Internet company providing
enterprise-wide services and scalable technologies to enable rapid transition
to Internet-empowered education, training, and management of knowledge
resources. He brought to this new venture over thirty years of faculty
and administrative experience at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, including serving as senior information technology officer
and founding and directing the Institute for Academic Technology.
Educom
Review Table of Contents
