Where oh Where is Plug & Play?
By Jack Gordon

In the long, hard battle to achieve common technology standards for e-learning content and administration systems, the first major goal is to achieve plug-and-play interoperability. That doesn't sound very sexy, as human aspirations go, but Sheldon Ellis falls asleep every night wishing that the industry would hurry up.

As director of the Buckman Laboratories Learning Center in Memphis, Tenn., Ellis is the top training manager for global specialty-chemicals manufacturer Buckman Laboratories. He would find it ever so much easier to deliver technology-based training to employees around the world if he could buy courseware from any vendor he chooses, then run and administer it with his Aspen learning management system (LMS) without spending thousands of dollars and untold amounts of time on integration work. That's what plug-and-play interoperability should mean.

A layman reading the sales literature from major suppliers of e-learning courseware, authoring tools, and LMS systems might be excused for assuming the industry already has arrived at plug-and-play. Systems, tools, and content are now commonly touted as AICC- and SCORM-compliant, meaning that they conform to interoperability specifications adopted by the long-standing Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee and the more recent Sharable Content Object Reference Model, a standards initiative sponsored partly by the United States Department of Defense.

That layman, however, would be wrong. The common standards promulgated by AICC, SCORM, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and other initiatives and organizations around the world are broad enough-or loose enough, or incomplete enough-that software designers can comply with them in a number of different ways. While an AICC-compliant course usually will launch on an AICC-compliant LMS, users like Ellis have found that capturing student data from the course (registration information, completion records, test scores, etc.) is often another matter altogether, yet capturing such data is a big part of what expensive LMS systems are supposed to do. Those record-keeping functions are especially important for compliance training to satisfy government agencies such as OSHA or the requirements of ISO-quality certification.

Early this year, Ellis says, he bought a library of technical and business-skills courses from e-learning content provider Thomson NETg. The courses were all AICC-compliant, as was his Aspen LMS from Click2learn. But while the NETg programs launched on the LMS, the record-keeping didn't translate. Agony ensued.

To its credit, Ellis says, "NETg finally stepped up and fixed the problem," unlike some other vendors whose AICC-compliant courseware had given him similar headaches. Indeed, he says, NETg has since launched a quality-control process in which it tests its courses to ensure that they will operate properly on a buyer's standards-compliant LMS. Still, sad experience has left Ellis a much warier shopper.

Today, he says, unless a vendor actually demonstrates to him that its courseware will run on his system, he operates on the assumption that "a standards-compliant course plus a standards-compliant LMS plus $50,000 of integration work will give me interoperability."

Plumbing first, objects second

It wasn't supposed to be like this. In the late 1990s, the glory days of the dot-com boom, the buzz about e-learning standards concerned a goal far more ambitious than simply getting vendor A's off-the-shelf training course to run on vendor B's LMS. That was just the plumbing piece of the standards issue-making the pipes fit together-and enthusiasts tended to wave it aside, speaking as if that objective were already in the bag or that it would be accomplished in a matter of moments.

Instead, the talk and the excitement in the standards community were all about "reusable content objects." The idea is that if e-learning designers can adopt a common, worldwide system for labeling and describing not just e-learning courses but individual chunks of a course (a diagram of an automobile carburetor, say, or a photograph of a diseased artery), then those small, granular chunks easily could be located and reused by other designers.

The descriptive language for these learning objects, similar to the information in a library's card catalog, is called metadata. A universal metadata system could form the backbone for an enormous, searchable repository of learning objects-a repository like the World Wide Web, but one on which finding the particular object or chunk you want would be far easier and more efficient than conducting a standard Internet search.

Metadata is still the glamorous piece of the standards puzzle, the part that offers the promise of a dramatic leap forward in the capabilities of e-learning and the part that truly excites most people who devote their time and energy to standards initiatives like IEEE's and SCORM. But disgruntled customers like Buckman's Ellis don't want to listen to any more visionary talk about reusable content objects until they're satisfied that the basic plumbing works. Under pressure from such customers, the vendor community lately has been forced to take a step back and concentrate on making sure the pipes fit together.

Realizing the dream of reusable content objects will be as much a business issue as a technology issue, says Leonard Greenberg, chief technology officer for LMS supplier Pathlore Software. Customers may like the idea of granular learning objects (reusable chunks like the previously mentioned carburetor diagram), he says, "but what they buy is full-scale courses. And as for content vendors, their business model is to sell courses, not learning objects." That being the case, the market's first demand is, indeed, simply that vendor A's course should run on vendor B's LMS.

It isn't as if standards groups have ignored the plumbing problems or made no progress since the late '90s. In fact, progress has been significant and rapid, says e-learning contributing editor Robby Robson, who chairs the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee. The reason things appear to be moving so slowly, Robson says, is that "progress has moved only at the speed of technology, not at the speed of marketing."
The consensus is that the standards community's efforts to date have taken the industry perhaps 80 percent of the way toward full interoperability of standards-compliant tools, courseware, and LMS systems. The trouble lies in integrating the last mile of pipes-usually the software pieces that handle things like test scoring, book-marking, and student record-keeping.

Suppliers of many standards-compliant LMS systems-Pathlore, Saba, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, TEDS, and others-say they now have procedures in place for testing custom or off-the-shelf courseware to ensure that it operates properly on their systems. Thinq Learning Solutions has created a Web-based tool, called the Courseware Compatibility Center, that allows customers to load a suspect course themselves and receive a detailed diagnostic report on specific coding problems that will prevent the course from exchanging data correctly with Thinq's LMS.

None of this, however, answers the question of who pays for any tinkering that must be done to make the courseware and the LMS fully compatible. As Alex Raymond, director of Thinq's content strategies group, puts it, "Somebody's got to write a check to cover the last 20 percent [of the work required] for nteroperability. The customers think that should be the supplier of the content or the LMS."

The suppliers, having already rendered their products compatible with existing interoperability standards, view this expectation as a threat to their margins and a drain on their resources. Several LMS suppliers have formed partnerships with selected content providers in which courses are routinely tested for compatibility at the vendors' expense; Thinq, for instance, says it tests courseware from NETg and SkillSoft. But outside of such partnerships, the question of who pays for any necessary tinkering is open to negotiation.

How long until plug-and-play?

The push for learning standards is often compared to earlier efforts to standardize things like the gauge of railroad tracks and the format for videotapes (remember the battle between VHS and Beta?). With computer software and systems, of course, it's a little more complicated.

The standards organizations have come furthest with the metadata piece of the puzzle. Although metadata descriptions will continue to evolve in years to come, that piece essentially is done, says IEEE's Robson. Standards exist today that allow any instructional designer to describe a course or a piece of a course with common "card-catalog" information that is understandable and accessible to any person or computer system familiar with the standards.

As for interoperability, Robson says, standards and specifications have advanced to the point where a compliant course almost always will launch on a compliant LMS, and the student usually can take any tests the course might include. "But just having content run isn't enough," he says. "What we want is content that runs in a highly adaptive fashion-in the context of company rules, academic copyright issues, learners being able to collaborate, the course being aware of the company's record-keeping system or of the library system at a university, and so on.
"That's where the bar keeps rising," Robson says. The standards groups haven't got the challenge licked yet. Neither do suppliers. And customers are getting impatient.

Cheryl Puterbaugh, manager of IT learning and e-learning for Procter & Gamble, says the situation has improved within the past year, but the industry still has a distance to travel before plug-and-play will become a reality.

"There's always something you have to do," Puterbaugh says, to get a standards-compliant course to interact fully with her compliant Saba LMS. For instance, "you might get it to report a test score, but you're not sure if it's an average of all unit tests or an end-of-course score. You're always doing trial-and-error to see how scores are reported or how data tracking works."
Or consider book-marking, the process by which a student can log into an LMS and access a course, then come back later, perhaps via a different computer, and have the system remember where he was in the course. "The AICC specs allow for that," she says, "but it often doesn't actually work until you monkey with something."

Training at Procter & Gamble is highly decentralized, Puterbaugh says, and most of the people out in the field who use her courseware-or develop their own-are not programmers. They're neither willing nor able to do the necessary monkeying. "Many of them have already created solutions that meet their needs," she says. "It's tough to get them to convert to an industry standard that meets maybe 80 percent of their needs." e-learning could not find a knowledgeable source willing to venture a concrete estimate of when the standards will develop sufficiently to make plug-and-play a reality. To further complicate the matter, Buckman's Ellis points out that e-learning exists within a wider context of interoperability issues that will continue to give people fits no matter how airtight the learning standards become.

Real plug-and-play isn't just a matter of getting the course to operate with the LMS, Ellis says. The course also must run properly on the learner's individual computer. For companies that don't want to exercise rigid control over the software loaded on employees' computers, that opens a can of worms almost too terrible to contemplate. What version of Internet Explorer does this machine use? What version of Microsoft Word? What cookies are present and when do they expire? Is AOL loaded? Has the user, perhaps unknowingly, allowed RealPlayer to take over his download process by setting it as the default option?

All of those issues and more have stymied Ellis' attempts to deliver standards-compliant training smoothly to Buckman employees. None of them have much, if anything, to do with specs that might be adopted by IEEE, AICC, SCORM, or any other body concerned solely with standards for e-learning.
Still, those groups are doing what they can, as fast as they can. Customer demand has pushed the vendor community to be far more responsive to interoperability issues than it was even a year ago. The picture is improving. Buyers need to remember, however, that Robby Robson is right: Things are getting better at the speed of technology, not at the speed of marketing.

 Reprinted from e-Learning Magazine