Participants

The Current Situation
The current Common Cartridge (CC) specification does not meet all of the needs for the K-12/Schools (primary and secondary) space as it stands. Considerations of revisions are required to support K-12/Schools specific requirements such as supporting content and assessments aligned to content standards and objectives, K-12/Schools lesson planning, formative and summative testing and reporting, and searching by learning standards.

The Rationale
Digital content delivery is fairly well defined now as part of the functionality of a Learning Management System (LMS). While many of these have been homegrown in the K-12/Schools market, over the past several years, some key players have emerged. Some are highly proprietary and require very specific product builds to move content through the system. Now, the publishers are faced with the very real problem of not only investing heavily in curriculum development against myriad content standards and objectives, but also now investing in delivering that same content in multiple formats. Long term, this translates into higher costs for the school districts due to the customization needed to deliver electronic content in independent, but specific, formats. This adds significant overhead costs each time a product must be customized to meet the proprietary formats of the Information Management Systems (IMS)/LMS.

Publishers and LMS vendors in the Higher Education space have been working towards a solution that would re-use existing standards and provide a specification that would answer some of the questions raised in K-12/Schools. The Common Cartridge (CC) specification, along with the experience gained from our higher-ed colleagues, is the starting ground to be used to address the content interoperability problem in K-12/Schools. However, K-12/Schools has specific needs not currently addressed by the Common Cartridge specifications. Particularly, the K-12/Schools content standards and objectives alignment of curriculum and assessments is not handled by the CC specification.

K-12/Schools Scope and Sequencing (Lesson Planning) is not available in CC. This is an additional area that must be addressed for this market. Publishers are struggling to meet the market needs of customers using different products with different formats for lesson planning. Delivery of lesson plans into proprietary systems is increasing the cost to end users due to incompatibilities.

Publishers, States, Local Education Authorities (LEAs), and classroom teachers continually create and administer assessment of all types, from formative to summative and formal to informal. Often these valuable resources are locked-in their original format or platform. Presently, items and tests provided from one vendor rarely work in another vendor's system, or are able to be repurposed in a different form. What is needed is a common format and structure to contain and enable interoperability and transportability of items, assessment, and item banks, along with the related standards and skills alignments, scoring keys and rubrics, and statistical parameters. In addition, a common method for describing and transferring the results of an assessment administration to enable effecting results aggregation and analysis is also need.

LEAs may choose to move from one LMS package to another based on features, service levels, pedagogy, etc.   The LEAs need to reuse the content they have acquired from content providers. Currently, most content is deployed in proprietary, LMS-specific packages. From a LEA perspective, migrating from one LMS system to another requires a substantial resource investment in program development, systems integration, and support. These investments are justified by the business value provided by the new LMS. In this context, content migration is a stranded cost - it requires substantial investment, but provides little value over the current solution. The LEA would like to be able to unload a content package from their current LMS and load it into their new LMS within the rights granted by the content provider.

The Charter
The IMS Technical Board approved the CCK12 v2.0 Charter in September 2007. IMS GLC Community Members may download a copy of the charter.

Further Information
For information on IMS GLC and the benefits of being a Contributing Member, please contact:

Rob Abel
Chief Executive Officer
IMS Global Learning Consortium
rabel@imsglobal.org