ADL's Missing Piece

THE CONTENT OBJECT REPOSITORY DISCOVERY AND REGISTRATION ARCHITECTURE IS ON THE FAST TRACK TO COMPLEMENT SHARABLE CONTENT OBJECT REFERENCE MODEL’S SUCCESSES.

The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) has been adopted for use in about two-thirds of commercial learning-management systems. It has also been accepted in the public and private sectors and in the academic community.

SCORM, however, does not address how to manage the discovery and access of digital content. The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Program has devised the Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration Architecture (CORDRA) to meet this requirement by unifying access to repositories of SCORM-conformant content and other types of content.

In February 2006, Dr. Paul Mayberry, deputy under secretary of defense (Readiness) and Dan Gardner, director of readiness and training, received a CORDRA executive- level review detailing the initiative’s progress to date.

CORDRA will enable ADL to establish a network of content repositories where learning objects may be accumulated and centrally catalogued for easy discovery, distribution and use, said Dr. Robert Wisher, Director, Advanced Distributed Learning.

The ADL-Registry (ADL-R) is the first instance of CORDRA, he added. “Instance,” as used by the ADL community, is a single, operational federation of repositories, to include hardware, software and local policy rules.

For the purpose of discovering content, the ADL-R will rely on a simple search of a catalog of registered “metadata” to find specific content the user is seeking.

Unlike searches using the World Wide Web, searches using ADL-R can identify content specifically authored for learning what resides in repositories, Wisher remarked.

The ADL-R system will provide a way to search for learning content via the catalogue of authored metadata in the ADL-R. That metadata will include information about the content in repositories that can be used to determine the adequacy of the content for the targeted learners. If the desired content is discovered, the ADL-R will return a universal resource locator (URL) to a particular repository. The ultimate retrieval of the discovered content, however, will be governed by the policies of the repository’s owner, such as limiting access to .mil users.

Three of the many benefits of ADLR include reduced infrastructure and development costs, reduced time to locate appropriate content and reduced duplication of content. In its present edition, draft Department of Defense Instruction 1322.hh directs the Office of the undersecretary of defense (Personnel & Readiness), to which Mayberry is assigned, to develop and maintain the ADL-R through the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).

The instruction is in final coordination within the OSD staff.

Like other Training Transformation initiatives, CORDRA and the ADL-R have been a collaborative effort. Primary team members include the ADL Program, Carnegie Mellon University, Corporation for National Research Initiatives and DTIC. Fifteen government groups took part in the research and development phase.

CORDRA Phase I, which deployed ADL-R, was completed in December 2005. Phase II is expected to be completed in April 2006.

DTIC will assume full management duties of ADL-R in August 2006.

ADL-R’s lessons learned are expected to be used in other ADL community efforts, said Paul Jesukiewicz, director of the Alexandria ADL Co-Laboratory.

Four of the many organizations and communities that have expressed interest in developing other instances of CORDRA include the Office of Personnel Management, Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. intelligence community and the Southeast Regional Education Board.

“This is the way ADL needs to move forward. CORDRA is a great idea,” Mayberry said. He complimented the ADL leadership in particular on establishing partnerships that have led to early successes.

Mayberry also presented his leading challenge: “The community must have the means for unfettered depositing of quality content into the repositories.”

Gardner also applauded the efforts expended in two years to reach the December Phase I milestone, but he provided a shortlist of other issues facing the team. Infrastructure development is still required to achieve the initiative’s potential, and processes must be in place to integrate other learning, performance and simulation content. ♦

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