Common Cartridge Working Group
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Common Cartridge Video by Chuck SeveranceCommon Cartridge Benefits
- Greater choice of content: Enables collections of learning resources of various types and sources.
- Reduces vendor/platform lock-in: Establishes course cartridge native formats endorsed by educational publishers, and supports a wide variety of established content formats, eliminating platform lock-in.
- Greater assessment options: Explicitly supports the most widely used standards for exchanging assessment items.
- Increases flexibility, sharing and reuse: Fits within the educational context of enabling instructors to assemble lesson plans of various resources and publish those as reusable and changeable packages that are easy to create, share, and improve.
Factors for Success
- Based on 10 years experience in learning content interoperability.
- Based on the most widely used interoperability standards for learning content and assessment.
- Supported by the leading educational publishers, assessment organizations, and learning platform providers and leading open source/open content initiatives.
- Easy to implement and flexible.
- Enables mapping to things we use and understand: textbooks, lesson plans, courses.
- Supports the overwhelmingly predominant educational and training paradigm: self-directed but guided learning with an instructor in the loop, coordinated with assessment and online communal learning (discussions).
- Component standards are in a very healthy state of improvement and evolution to support future needs.
Common Cartridge Format
The Common Cartridge defines a commonly supported content format, able to run on any compliant LMS platform. Version 1.0 supports the following features:
- Rich content
- html, xml, web links, SCORM
- Media files (mpg, jpg, mp3)
- Application files (e.g., Microsoft Office)
- Integrated assessments
- Multiple choice (single or multiple response)
- True/false
- Essay
- Simple fill in the blank
- Pattern match
- Discussion forums
- Metadata – descriptive metadata for cartridges based on simple Dublin Core
- Authorization for protected content
Future versions will introduce:
- Web/enterprise integration with third-party tools and services
- Lesson plans
- Competency maps based on educational standards
- Accessibility support
Creating the Common Cartridge
The IMS Global Learning Consortium is actively completing the development of the Common Cartridge format and associated tests for developers. The project group is made up of major publishers, LMS vendors, the open source community, and other interested parties. The CC Alliance provides a number of resources to help software vendors implementing the specification, content providers creating cartridges and user institutions and practitioners in harnessing the power of Common Cartridge.
The Common Cartridge builds upon the widely implemented IMS Content Packaging specification, adding support for the following standards:
- Metadata
- ISO 15836:2003: Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (mapped to the corresponding elements in LOM)
- IEEE 1484.12.1-2002: Learning Object Metadata
- IEEE 1484.12.3-2005: LOM Schema binding (loose binding)
- Content
- IMS Authorization Web Service v1.0
Further Information
For information on the Common Cartridge and participation in the project, please contact us.