Breakout Session

Architectures for Online Education: Using IMS and XML

Facilitator:

Chris Candler, MD
The University of Oklahoma College of Medicine

Summary:

The EDUCAUSE Instructional Management System (IMS) specification (www.imsproject.org) represents an international movement to standardize the delivery of online education. This specification defines a platform-independent mechanism to create a truly open educational environment. Still in development, IMS seeks to standardize the architecture, metadata, and interfaces of educational content. Moreover, IMS will provide educators with mechanisms to track student progress, and manage student profiles. To do this, IMS employs a new markup language, XML.

Like HTML, XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a web-based subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). However, HTML has several limitations, as its frozen set of tags is essentially a simple page layout language rather than a truly extensible markup language like SGML or XML. XML allows users to define their own discipline-specific tags that they may insert into their web pages (i.e., marking up). Through these custom tags, documents can be given machine-readable context that will enable users to view the data from multiple perspectives. Additionally, XML has the ability to separate style from data, which will allow media-independent portability (e.g., computer screen, CD-ROM, laser printer). In these ways XML will deliver important features to IMS as it provides a more powerful framework to visualize, manage and share information.

Benefit in Attending Session:

This breakout session is of interest to educators and technologists who are interested in the Educause IMS standard for online courses. The underlying structure of IMS, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) will also be covered.

FACILITATOR'S INFORMATION

Chris Candler
Information Technology
University of Oklahoma, Health Sci Cent
1000 Stanton L. Young Blvd.
Lib Suite 418
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73104
 
405-271-9090
Fax Number:
405-271-2553
chris-candler@ouhsc.edu