CEN

“Standards come through adoption”, as David Moldof (advisor to  RS3G) declared during the first RS3G workshop -  everything else is mere specification.  This statement is at the core of the so-called “adoption dilemma”. Simply put, any standardization activity has the ultimate goal of producing specifications that get adopted in the market. Historically this is due to the disconnect between Standardization Authorities and Implementation Communities - such awareness gap between end-users the standard-making bodies suggests that “there has been a failure to recognize fully the priorities of end-users and that this might explain in part the limited adoption of standards and specifications in education” (Roadmap to Interoperability for Education in Europe: The LIFE Report, EUN, December 2006)

In an effort to “bridge the gap”, the recent collaboration  between CEN (European Committee for Standardization) and RS3G sets a precedent in the pursuing a new approach to standards-making.
CEN WSLT (Workshop on Learning Technologies) has contributed to the effective development and use of relevant and appropriate standards for learning technologies for Europe since it’s conception in 1999, while RS3G is a self-established group of software implementers and stakeholders in the European Higher Education domain which is focused on contributing to the definition and adoption of electronic standards for the exchange of student data.    

The CEN WSLT is approaching the Standards issue from a Top-Down perspective, while the RS3G is taking on a Bottom-Up investigation.  If the CEN is concerned with high level, abstract models, leading to a new European specification for exchanging HE data, the Vendor group is more focused on the concrete implementations of solutions. The two different approaches are complementary, or at least put into relation with each other - if it is true that "standards comes through adoption and everything else is mere specification" then through this synergy it is possible to help bridging the gap between specification and standard. In practical sense, RS3G feeds to CEN the business cases needing “standardization”, provides a pool of domain experts and the market perspectives, as well as scouting opportunities for early adoption. In turn, CEN models the requirements and inputs into specifications this feedback mechanism ultimately optimizes the standard life-cycle by both decreasing the time-to-market of a standard and by greatly enhancing the adoption rate of the specification.

The collaboration between Standardization Authorities (CEN) and the Implementation community (RS3G) produced its first results in two projects: MLO-AD (Metadata for Learning Opportunity-Advertising) and ELM (European Learner Mobility)

MLO-AD

MLO-Advertising (MLO-AD) is a standard addressing metadata sufficient for advertising a learning opportunity.
The goal of MLO-AD is to provide information about a learning opportunity, to enable the learner to make a decision if there is a need for more information about the learning opportunity, and where to find that information.
MLO-AD is a lightweight standard that fits well with existing business processes and technologies.
The MLO-AD standard facilitates semantic technologies and web architectures to support several mechanisms for exchange of  information and aggregation of information by third party service suppliers. The standard is compliant with the ECTS requirement.
MLO-AD is a good example of  “Harmonization”-type of standard, as it built on existing specification for describing course data.

For more info :  http://wiki.teria.no/confluence/display/CIF/Home
 

ELM

European Learner Mobility (ELM) objective is the provision of guidelines on a data model for the expression and exchange of European Learner Mobility information, as defined by the European Transparency instruments. The results of the proposed work will contribute to the effort towards interoperable European-wide IT systems that manage and exchange EUROPASS related information.
The rationale behind this initiative finds it roots in Lisbon meeting in March 2000, where the European Council set the i2010 goal for the European Union to “become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”.(Lisbon Convention, March 23-24 2000).
Making this happen will mean establishing strong links  between the development of the European Higher Education Area (the “Bologna process”) and the enhanced European co-operation in Vocational Education and Training (the “Copenhagen process”). As part of the Lisbon mandate, the Commission has taken initiatives to establish synergies between both processes for the design of national frameworks of qualifications and an overarching European Qualifications Framework (EQF) for Lifelong Learning, taking into account the work done in the Bologna and Copenhagen contexts.
The proposed project's results will

• Contribute to the consolidation and European-wide adoption of electronic transparency documents.
• Support the development of information systems for the implementation of the Bologna process, at institutional, national and European levels.
• Support learner mobility and quality assurance in the European educational setting.
• Support the wider availability of brokerage services across the EU.
• Enable data consistency and facilitate data quality management.

This activity will build upon existing structures and the extensive application profiling experience of transparency documents in European countries such as the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Norway.

Existing specifications will be used as the basis of this activity. A close collaboration channel with the CEN WSLT (Workshop for Learning Technologies) Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO) group will be established, given that a large subset of mobility information is related to the description and referencing of learning opportunities and that there is a specific focus of the MLO project on the Europass modeling.

For more info: http://wiki.teria.no/confluence/display/EuropeanLearnerMobility/European+Learner+Mobility