Standard

Definition

• The goal of standardization is to improve efficiency of actions and interactions.

There are various degrees of technical standards:

1. "Real standards" of very high formal quality adopted by bodies such as ISO, IEE, IEC, ITU, etc.
2. Standards like the W3C "Recommendations" or the IETF "Requests for Comments" (RFCs) or the OASIS document standards.
3. De facto standards (usually no formalization at all) like Microsoft products.

• Standards can be open or propriety. Open means publicly available, not necessarily free.

Standards in educational technology

See also educational modeling language that deals in more depth with the question of modeling learning materials and activities

Pedagogical standards

There are no real general standards, but the closet things are

• Rather formal Instructional design methods like MISA
• Data standards like IMS Learning Design or IMS simple sequencing do rely or support some classes of instructional design models. Even IMS Content Packaging default organisation section can be considered a pedagogical standard if one considers that "shovelware" or "page turners" are a standard pedagogical design ;)

• In some countries there are quite precise curricula standards, e.g.
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS, 1993) Benchmarks for Science Literacy
  • National Research Council’s (NRC, 1996) National Science Education Standards,

Pedagogical data standards

• The SCORM family includes implicit or explit ideas on sequencing
• IMS Content Packaging, a standard for assembly of resources, metadata and sequencing information into a learning object
• IEEE Learning Object Metadata Standard (LOM), a standard to describe artifacts
• IMS Learning Design and IMS simple sequencing, to describe pedagogical scenarios
• IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI), a test and testing data standard

Systems standards

• The SCORM specifications define some java-script bindings to insure interroperability of simple interactive contents (that is BTW one of the areas where a lot of systems are not Scorm compatible, even if they claim so ...)
• IMS General Web Services to allow for interoperability of various systems. This is a fairly new standard (Jan 2006) and is an interesting initiative.

Some technical standards of interest

There are various standardization bodies and procedures:

• For the moment, see the Wikipedia:Internet standard entry for details

Standardization bodies

This is a list of bodies that create "real" or "de facto" standards

In education

• IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee
• IMS Global Learning Consortium
• IMS Global Learning Consortium
• ADL - Advanced Distributed Learning (SCORM)
• AICC - Aviation Industry CBT Committee

Specialized ICT

• W3C - World Wide Web Consortium (Web standards)

• OASIS

• The Internet Engineering Task Force (part of the Internet Society

• RFC - Requests for comments (Informal Internet standards, sometimes standardized by an "official body" sometimes not. The most important source for Internet standards.)

General

(including ICT standards)

• ISO - International Organization of Standardization (many very formal ICT standards).

• CEN - European Committe for Standardization ,featuring a not standards-compliant webpage ;)

• ECMA (e.g. JavaScript)

• NIST US National Institute of Standards and Technology

Links

• Webstandards.org, a grassroots organization promoting use of standards

• CETIS - the centre for educational technology interoperability standards A British consortium that is the best overall resource on standards related to our field.

• Resource-Base - Standards, Architectures and Open Source in Education. Large index (backended with delious so get nice tag clouds).