The ability to be able to transfer material from one e-learning system to another is very important. The advent of interoperability specifications and standards should, theoretically, reduce anxiety about 'lock in' of learning material into one virtual learning product or another. But what is the actual experience? If you want to know read on! I have recently been looking at how easy it is to move small amounts of content in and out of systems; all claiming IMS compliance. These are WebCT 4.1, Blackboard 5 and the Reload Editor which is an IMS compliant Content Packager and Metadata tool available from the JISC Reload Project. Initially, I added some content resources to Reload and packaged the resources ready to upload into the VLEs. The result? With WebCT there was a modicum of ‘success’ in that some content was displayed but not accurately. The task completely failed in Blackboard.
Content packaged in Blackboard could not be loaded into WebCT and vice versa. Neither could these packages be imported into Reload. Whilst Reload supports v1.1.3 of the IMS Content Packaging specification and v1.1.2 of the IMS Metadata specification, proprietary VLEs have added their own extensions to the specification (the 'get out of jail' term here folks is Application Profile). This allows content to be moved within courses of a given VLE but not between VLEs. It seems to me that the IMS specification is being ‘customised’ for each VLE! How is this then a standard? 'Lock-in' is still with us but at least you can feel better because your 'lock-in' is IMS compliant … with extensions.
