Research Summary

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative’s Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM®) has evolved to provide a modular, object-based design approach for digital objects that solved key interoperability and reusability issues across many learning systems in industry and government. SCORM has enjoyed widespread international adoption, has become a de facto standard in many learning communities, and is supported by Department of Defense (DoD) policy. While SCORM advances the state of the art in designing and creating interoperable and reusable objects, it does not address finding and reusing objects after they have been created.

In 2003, ADL began work to solve this problem. As its sponsor observed, “It doesn’t do much good to have interoperable and reusable digital objects if people can’t find and use them.” ADL launched an investigation into the difficulties and realities of object creation, storage, and management and uncovered the limitations and problems encountered by others in related fields, such as library science, computer and network systems design, and publishing. As ADL investigated these fields and formulated high-level requirements for the learning community, it quickly found that many problems had not been solved by others and that the problem space was much more complex than it first appeared.

CORDRA

This led to the creation of a new approach to discover and use distributed digital objects known as the Content Object Repository Discovery Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA). CORDRA defined three processes for obtaining digital objects that precisely meet the needs of learners and developers: contextualization, discovery, and resolution. With CORDRA, context defines discovery criteria, which then identify relevant objects that can be resolved to a location and then retrieved and delivered to the user. The first publicly available implementation of CORDRA was the ADL Registry.

ADL Registry

The ADL Registry provides a mechanism to search for digital objects within DoD and enables their discovery and reuse by the DoD learning community and by other communities concerned with learning technology.

The primary goal of the ADL Registry is to provide the means to register, search for, and discover digital objects developed by many independent developers. The registry assumes that objects created locally will be stored in digital repositories. It makes no assumptions about how repositories are implemented or administered. This approach has minimal impact on repository business practices by accommodating a wide variety of implementations, business rules, and workflows. The ADL Registry addresses the needs of DoD. Other CORDRA registries can be implemented for other communities (see http://doregistry.org for generic CORDRA registry source code). The ADL Registry provides a means to gather, or federate information about digital objects from multiple sources and then index that information so that developers and users can discover, locate, and access the objects they need (see ADL Registry and CORDRA documentation for more information).

Studies

Several studies have been conducted to examine this search and retrieval research area. In 2009, the RAND Corporation published its monograph entitled The Prospects for Increasing the Reuse of Digital Training Content (see http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG732.html). In the same year, ADL determined that there was a need to identify a permanent host for the ADL Registry and to also re-examine the ADL Registry from a performance and technology perspective. Booz Allen Hamilton was selected to conduct an analysis to recommend a permanent host for the ADL Registry (Report). ICF International, teamed with Novonics Corporation, was selected to look at the performance issues impacting the success of the ADL Registry and to examine the technology used by successful registries and repositories for potential adoption by the ADL Initiative (Presentation).

Findings

These studies had numerous findings and recommendations. Some of these findings and recommendations are highlighted below:

• Approaches to sharing need to be easy
• Access to content is a challenge
• There is a dearth of learning content repositories
• There is a need for DoD-wide .mil discovery and access infrastructure
• There are significant economic incentives and disincentives to sharing
• There are three primary reuse strategic approaches: top-down (coordination-driven), reusable learning object (RLO), and bottom-up (asset-driven)
• Primary obstacles to implementing reuse strategies are 1) issues with metadata or repositories, 2) lack of strategic planning for reuse, 3) cultural issues, and 4) legal or security issues

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