16.1 Open source and open standards

About 18 months ago, in February of 2006 I was appointed the CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium . IMS is a non-profit member consortium focused on developing open standards for interoperability in the domain of learning and education. My sense was that open source software was an important trend in this domain, especially in the higher education segment. I had some fairly recent exposure to higher ed open source in the U.S. having just completed a research study on current usage and prospective usage. In discussions with the IMS Board of Directors, which included at the time several providers of non-open source solutions (and still does, by the way) there was confirmation on the importance of including open source initiatives in the open standards discussion. Since then IMS has included open source and open technology program tracks in our annual conference and added a couple of open source leaders, Moodle (course management platform) and INFORMS (student and administrative system platform), in addition to some existing participation from the Sakai community , to our active participants.

I’ve also been involved in several invited presentations and panel discussions with some other very smart folks on the topic of open source and open technologies in both the higher ed and K-12 school segments. Through an accumulated experience of two years looking at open source and open standards and how they can, will, or might impact the learning technology segment, I have, at least initially, concluded a few things about open source, open standards and the relationship between them. Since we have a long way to go, I’m offering these as postulates that need to be proven. Here goes:

Postulate number one: open source reference implementations are extremely critical in achieving adoption of open standards for software interoperability.

One of my favorite sayings of the month is, “learning technology interoperability standards – great for researchers or consultants, bad for interoperability.” The point being that pretty much all the specifications developed over the last ten years of progress are well, not very specific. Ethernet they are not. This, above all, in my opinion and in the opinion of many IMS members is the single largest reason that much very good work has been thwarted in terms of its potential for adoption.