# Introduction

## Introduction

Given the current need of the professors as .LRN users of having a tool that lets them define and set up the workflow of their courses and a synchronization and interaction between different roles of an e-learning experience, the IMS-LD package provides the support to fulfil these needs, making use of the IMS Learning Design (from now on referred as IMS-LD).

## Integrating IMS-LD with .LRN

Using the IMD LD specification, the professor is able to indicate the moment (which could be based on conditions) in which a role is going to do an activity and which materials and services are going to be used. Integrating IMD LD into .LRN, the professor is able to use all the services provided by .LRN, such as forums for asynchronous interaction, chat as synchronous interaction, assessments to evaluate the e-learning process (students and contents), the evaluation package (grade book) to support a a variety of learning and support activities, etc. And all of this is done in a centralized way, from an IMS-LD editor.

The main idea is to load an IMS-LD document (which is an XML document) and play it. To play an IMS-LD document is nothing more than to perform the activities prescribed in the document with its related environment which defines the learning objects and services, and this is when the interaction with the .LRN services begin. The IMS-LD package is able to detect and indicate what .LRN service is the most indicated one to perform a given IMS-LD service. The activities will follow the sequence prescribed in the IMS-LD document, each member of the course will perform a specific set of activities according to the member's role inside the course. The professor is able to decide the different roles that the course supports, and which role can do what at any given time during the course life, and following the defined sequence.

With the IMS-LD package, the professor is able to let the learner choose between the activities, make the learner follow a specific sequence or use a combination of both sequenced and learner's choice activities. And that's not all, the professor is also able to define the sequence of the learning activities using conditions and properties that change according to the learner behavior during the course (as defined at the the level B of the Learning Design Specification). Moreover .LRN can take advantage from the power notification system in order to send messages and set new activities based on events (as defined at the level C of the Learning Design Specification)

The IMS-LD package provides an IMS-LD editor, an IMS-LD player, an IMS-LD viewer and an IMS-LD importer/exporter. Each one of these is described later on this document.

## Pedagogical Flexibility

The IMS-LD specification is flexible in the description of all different kinds of pedagogies and not prescribe any specific pedagogical approach. (IMS-LD spec) The IMS-LD specification does not follow any pedagogy. When doing the integration with .LRN, this pedagogical flexibility has to be preserved, letting the professor to give the course in any way he or she wants, limiting as less as possible the professor choices when creating the IMD LD document.

## Historical Considerations

There is some work done so far that we could use in the near future:

- Alfanet.The people of Alfanet have already done some integration of IMS-LD and OpenACS which is published in the Alanet project page. We couldn't do any reuse of the resources dough, because at the time of developing the package we didn't have access to the code.

- LAMS. At the time of writing this specification, we were planing to do an integration with LAMS, which is a tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. The LAMs project is already integrated with Moodle. We can take advantage of that integration experience, but we expect to write all the code at .LRN from scratch, and maybe later work on the integration.

- RELOAD. It has an IMS-LD editor which is independent from any LMS. By means of this editor, you can generate an IMS-LD for a concrete course. Also it has integrated the CopperCore player

- CopperCore. It has an IMS-LD editor which is independent from any LMS. By means of this editor, you can generate an IMS-LD for a concrete course. Also it has a player.

  Our purpose is to be able to interpret the IMS-LD generated by RELOAD, CopperCore and LAMS and whichever IMS-LD that can be generated by other different authoring tools.

## Competitive Analysis

There are a lot of competing products.The IMS-LD specification is very large and has many different options. Each product can implement the most suitable features. Also, it does not indicate how to implement it. And therefore, different LMS can implement it in a different way depending on their services. This is a compatibility problem, but it can be solved by a convenient mapping between the different IMS-LD references and the different services of a LMS

Moreover, when writing the specification we tried to incorporate the ideas from the competing products (each one of them has its own way of dealing with the IMS-LD specification), and from the experience we had when using them. A detailed analysis would be too much for the moment.

## Extensibility

The .LRN implementation must be easily extensible. The IMS-LD specification may change in the future, so the .LRN implementation has to be done taking that into account. The .LRN implementation must be so flexible in order to adapt to the possible changes of the IMS-LD specification. This means that if a change is produced in IMS-LD specification, then this should imply only minor changes in our .LRN implementation of IMS-LD. Also, if the initial specification should be extended it should be done in an easy way.

Reusability and standards

The implementation must follow, as much as possible, the standards defined by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. For example for the compatibility problem that was mentioned before, there should be an easy way to modify which .LRN service performs which IMS-LD service, and also to add a new type of IMS-LD service and the corresponding .LRN service that will be in charge of dealing with it.

Our XML parser has to be aware of this flexibility, being easy to modify according to the, probably often, changes or improvements in the specification. The mapping between the service types and its corresponding .LRN services can be easily edited via web. Everything that can possibly change in the near future, must be easily extensible as this was mentioned in the previous section

## User Requirements

The user requirements are described in detail in the User Requirements Chapter. In this section we explain in detail the objectives of the IMS-LD package, as well as the way to achieve them.

## Use Cases

In this Chapter we give some use cases that correspond to frequently applications that can be handled by the ims-ld package

## API

The API will be defined during the development phase.

## Data Model

The data model is described in the Data Model Chapter, and it intends to show all the tables where the information will be stored.

The IMS-LD specification is large and the number of tables to store all the information is large too. We don't store every information that comes in the IMS-LD compliant XML file when parsing it, because there are some metadata and tags that can be ignored, not affecting the behavior of the unit of learning.

Anyway, you can take a look at the data model and see how we store the information in the different tables and how these tables are related between them. As you will notice, the data model is almost the exactly the representation of the tables in the IMS-LD Information Model in a relational database, plus some control tables.

## Architectural Model

The architectural model is described in the Architectural Model Chapter, and it presents the general architectural related to the ims-ld package. It explains each part of the system and particularly the ims-ld package, and are described the aspects about the implementation as for example the mapping between .LRN services and IMS-LD services,

## Authors

The specifications for the IMS-LD package have been written by Pedro Muñoz and Jose Pablo Escobedo with help from people within and outside the OpenACS community.