Common Cartridge Working Group
Common Cartridge Alliance - Find out
More
Learning Industry Leaders
Agree to Be Initial Investors in
Testing Platform for Open Standards-based Digital Learning Materials
IMS
Announcement on Common Cartridge - Leading Publishers and Learning
Management System Providers Commit to Support of Common Cartridge
Standard
Common
Cartridge Video by Chuck Severance
Common
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:
Kevin Riley
Senior Strategist for New Activities
IMS Global Learning Consortium
kriley@imsglobal.org
Tel: +44 (0)114 221 6662
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
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