Retrieved from Washtech.com
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11555-2002May13.html

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 14, 2002; Page E05 


Michael Parmentier almost gushes about the potential benefits of online learning. He envisions a world where pieces of information -- no matter how detailed or obscure -- are instantaneously available, packaged and delivered for easy absorption.

Next week, Parmentier's vision will come a step closer to reality. An initiative spearheaded by the Department of Defense to make various online training technologies work together has quickly produced an unofficial set of standards for the industry. "When we first tried to use distance learning, every time you changed a chip or part of the system, we'd have to recreate all of the content," said Parmentier, director of readiness training policy and programs for the Defense Department. "We knew that if we could create an agreed-upon platform, we wouldn't have to keep changing the content that had been created."

In November 1997, Parmentier's office quietly put out a notice that it would hold a meeting in Rosslyn to discuss the need for standards among electronic-learning technologies. More than 400 people showed up and "they just wouldn't go away," he said. 

That meeting spawned a collaborative effort by government agencies, private companies and academic institutions to develop standards for not only the military but all e-learning systems. Rather than independently creating its own set of standards and requiring that vendors adjust their products accordingly -- as was often done with other technologies -- the Pentagon let industry experts guide the project. It set up shop in Alexandria and secured $6.5 million in federal money to fund the testing and development of e-learning standards, now called the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative, or ADL. The initiative's goal was to create a set of basic principles for content and software providers so that information created for one unit or organization would be accessible on any other e-learning system.

While other sets of standards emerged before the Defense Department's initiative was launched, no one organization had the influence to set an industry-wide standard. For many software and content providers, the military represents a large, coveted client with too much clout to ignore. "Once there is a first big buyer in any industry, a standard emerges. The DOD is the single largest trainer in the world -- they were that huge buyer," said Elliott Masie, president of the Masie Center, a think tank in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. "They were seen as being honest, independent. And everybody wanted the same objective -- content that was reusable and could be personalized."

Masie, who served as a consultant on the project, believes that without the Pentagon's involvement, comprehensive industry standards would still be 10 years away. Rather than starting from scratch, the ADL standard took its cues from existing sets of standards and developed a more thorough set. Because of the group's rapid and inclusive efforts, he said, even other standards that are still in use have been largely marginalized. "They've created an environment, where if you're in the business, you would be a fool not to address the standards they've come up with," Masie said. "Not that they were meant to become a bully customer, but it was just rational -- no other single player had the clarity to do this."

Robby Robson, chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Learning Technology Standards Committee, argued that while the Defense Department's e-learning initiative has been a success, it is more a compilation of existing specifications than the creation of new standards. "Their role has been making these things that all the other organizations developed practical. . . . They created a working model," Robson said. "They certainly aren't making accredited or legal standards. What they've done is in essence is say, 'Here is all the work that all these people did and we have real business cases and real needs, so let's go out and get it done.' And more power to them, because they did it." 

The ADL project counts industry leaders such as Electronic Data Systems Corp., Click2learn.com, IBM Global Services, Microsoft Corp. and SkillSoft Corp. among its partners.

The ADL work, and the span of its influence on e-learning, has not been without criticism from some players in the sector. While vendors have little choice but to make their products fit the ADL standard (named the Sharable Content Object Reference Model), some say they are too focused on tracking content and cannot yet guarantee that all systems deemed compliant will actually work together.

Amar Dhaliwal, vice president of engineering at ThinQ Learning Solutions Inc., said his company moved quickly to make its content management and delivery products compliant when ADL's standards were first released in 2000. Next week, when the new version is released, it will do so again. To do otherwise, he said, the company would risk losing the confidence of both government and corporate clients. "The standards are still relatively young, and as they go through different versions, there are significant gray areas. Someone can be creating content that is compliant but it still might not fully work on all learning management systems," Dhaliwal said.

Regardless of its kinks, few in the e-learning world deny that the initiative will continue to have a profound effect on the industry. "The eventual advantage is that we're going to provide a digital knowledge environment where chunks of knowledge are going to be shareable and reusable. If they exist somewhere, you will be able to find them," said the Pentagon's Parmentier. "Eventually we'll have a world where knowledge flows like water or electricity."