Educational Technology Standards in Focus

Educational technology standards, or learning technology standards, as they are also known, have become an increasingly important area of multimedia technology and e-learning over the past decade. These standards have been developed and refined, and have grown to encompass wider aspects of e-learning as the discipline has matured. The scope and reach of e-learning and technology-enhanced systems has increased as a result of this maturing of the discipline. The “holy grail” of e-learning is to enable individualized, flexible, adaptive learning environments that support different learning models or pedagogical approaches to any Internet-enabled user, that these environments should also integrate into the wider MIS/student records system of the teaching institution, and that they should be cost-effective to develop, maintain, and update. The level of functionality of the current systems certainly has not gotten to this level yet, but there have been a number of big improvements made recently in certain of these areas, in particular, in how to make it less time-consuming to develop, more cost-effective, and interoperable. Educational Technology Standards have been in the forefront of these developments. The learning technology standardization process is leading the research effort in Web-based education. Standardization is needed for two main reasons: (1) educational resources are defined, structured, and presented using various formats; and (2) functional modules embedded in a particular learning system cannot be reused by another system in a straightforward way (Anido-Rifon, Fernandez-Iglesias, Llamas-Nistal, Caeiro-Rodriguez, & Santos-Gago, 2001). In this article, the main Educational Technology Standards will be presented, notably, LOM, SCORM, and OKI; their uses and coverage will be outlined; their shortcomings will be discussed; and the current areas of research will be reviewed.