Avoiding the great train wreck: standardizing the architecture for online curricula

The advent of the World Wide Web and related technologies has encouraged medical schools to generate a wealth of online curricular materials. Unfortunately, the diversity and abundance of user-friendly authoring tools have enabled individual instructors within and among medical schools to proliferate educational resources with often widely dissimilar architectures. Because there are no universal standards for educational technology, the resulting information islands cannot be easily managed, reused, or shared with other educators and institutions. Thoughtful planning and reuse of online educational materials could allow instructors to present subject matter more consistently across the curriculum, discover new teaching resources, easily create new materials, reduce unnecessary duplication, and better integrate the basic and clinical sciences. To make this possible, standardized, object-oriented architecture is needed. While several excellent HTML authoring tools and integrated courseware packages are available, differences in their technologies and methods impede inter-operability between the various products and the materials they create. Through the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) specification has emerged as a global standard for online teaching and learning environments. This proposed standard defines a common architecture for content management and delivery.