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April 15, 2003

The Pain of Multiplicity

George Siemens responds to my comments. He writes:

the standards are being built ahead of use...."we build it...you move in".

Standards should be created to allow for the injection of experience. The open source community has something to offer in this area: build functionality and features as users define them to be important...release early, release often - let the users needs speak to the standards development. It doesn't matter how simple you make the end user process...if the standards haven't reflected their wants and needs - you may have a simple process...but one that's not useful.

I don't believe you can create standards like you build software. "Release early, release often" doesn't work for standards. Standards, by definition have to be . . . well, standard! If you release often, you have something that changes frequently, the antithesis of "standard." (Although many would say that's where we are with SCORM today!)

Nore are these standards being developed in a vacuum absent any experience with users. SCORM is building on, as David Carter-Tod said yesterday, "the military's long involvement in training and instructional design in the U.S. (basically, the second world war: 'Quick, train several million civilians to be soldiers')." AICC, which forms at least part of the core of most of the other standards (SCORM, IMS, ARIADNE, IEEE LTSC, etc.) comes out of decades of real-world experience with computer-based training. Of course, as David went on to note, these might not be the users people in higher ed want the models based on. I think that's a valid concern that I hope IMS is addressing.

Everyone in the instructional technology community is feeling frustration over this standards stuff. But I don't think the issue is the complexity of the standards, nor do I think the issue is a disconnect between the standards and the functional needs/desires of users.

We are at -- and have been for a decade or more -- the "Beta/VHS" stage of instructional technology standards. There are multiple standards that don't mesh together well. That's nothing new. The difference now is this stuff we call e-learning is becoming widespread. There is an increasing need for stuff to work well together, and it just doesn't yet. The education community is feeling the pain of multiplicity.

George said "the greatest enemy is complexity." I disagree. Complexity in standards is fine; multiplicity is the enemy of standardization.

The good news is, the pain of multiplicity forces standardization to move forward, whether it's Beta losing out to VHS, or all the instructional technology standards coming together under the SCORM umbrella. As George recently noted himself, progress was made at bringing all the various standard closer together at last month's IEEE LTSC meeting.

Keep your fingers crossed. :-)

Posted April 15, 2003 10:11 AM

Comments

Comments by Lisa Corley . Posted April 29, 2003 09:01 AM