IMS Global

IMS Global Learning Consortium (usually known as ITIMS or IMS GLC) is a global, nonprofit, member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in the education and corporate learning sectors worldwide. IMS GLC members provide leadership in shaping and growing the learning industry through community development of interoperability and adoption practice standards and recognition of the return on investment from learning and educational technology. Their main activity is to develop interoperability standards and adoption practice standards for distributed learning, some of which like QTI and Content Packaging are very widely used.

Although the IMS has produced many good specifications, some criticism of it centers on the fact that, unlike most bodies working in the standards space, it requires large membership fees for organizations or individuals seeking to review or comment on its work.

Scope of IMS standards

The scope for IMS specifications and standards cover most of the data elements used in "distributed and collaborative learning." IMS specifications promote the adoption of learning and educational technology and allow selection of best of breed products that can be easily integrated with other such products. These include a wide variety of technologies that support or enhance the learning experience, such as web-based course management system, learning management systems, virtual learning environments, instructional management systems, student administrative systems, ePortfolios, assessment systems, adaptive tutoring systems, collaborative learning tools, web 2.0 social learning tools, learning object repositories, and so forth. These include technologies and products that support learning situations that involve support for collaborative learning involving learners and instructors. The learners may be in a traditional educational environment (i.e., a school classroom in a university), in a corporate or government training setting, or at home.

History

In 1997 the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative of Educause began a project to create a set of widely adopted standards for exchanging college learning content. The founding universities included California State University, University of Michigan, and University of North Carolina. The acronym IMS originally stood for Instructional Management Systems; but the full term was quickly dropped and now only IMS is used. While IMS got its start in higher education, it moved quickly into a much wider range of learning contexts, including corporate and government training and K-12 education.

Common Cartridge

Common Cartridge is a specification being developed by IMS. The Common Cartridge (CC) standard distills state-of-the-art practice in online education and training into an easy-to-follow format for creating and sharing digital content.

Common Cartridge benefits include:

• Greater choice of content: Enables collections of learning resources of various types and sources.
• Reduces vendor/platform lock-in: Establishes course cartridge native formats endorsed by educational publishers, and supports a wide variety of established content formats, eliminating platform lock-in.
• Greater assessment options: Explicitly supports the most widely used standards for exchanging assessment items.
• Increases flexibility, sharing and reuse: Fits within the educational context of enabling instructors to assemble lesson plans of various resources and publish those as reusable and changeable packages that are easy to create, share, and improve.

The Common Cartridge format includes the following specifications:

• Content Packaging v1.2
• Question & Test Interoperability v1.2
• IMS Tools Interoperability Guidelines v1.0
• IEEE Learning Object Metadata v1.0
• SCORM v1.2 & 2004 (Essentially common cartridge specification v1.0 DOES NOT include SCORM. As stated in IMS CP 1.1.4 Best Practices and Implementation guide SCORM was considered in development of this new standard)

The Common Cartridge Alliance is a community of institutions committed to supporting and adopting the Common Cartridge standard.

See also

• SharePointLMS
• OLAT
• ATutor
• ANGEL Learning
• Desire2Learn
• E-learning
• Moodle
• QTI
• Sakai Project
• SCORM
• Virtual learning environment
• Agrega

External links

• Opening Up Online Learning Inside Higher Ed, October, 2006
• Latest Activities of IMS Global Learning Consortium
• IMS Common Cartridge Working Group
• Common Cartridge Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• Common Cartridge Specification
• Common Cartridge Roadmap. MERLOT, 2007.
• Video on Common Cartridge Sakai project
• Why Teachers' Unions Should Demand Support For Common Cartridge, Michael Feldstein, e-Literate
• IMS Global Web Site
• Video report on Common Cartridge demonstration
• IMS Common Cartridge roadmap
• IMS Question & Test Interoperability Specification (mailing list)
  • IMS Accessibility Project Group
  • IMS Learning Tools Interoperability Working Group
  • IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange Project Group
  • IMS Learning Information Services Project Group