1) Mike Pettit of Blackboard, Inc was until recently a contractor to

the IMS design team, and he wrote the interface descriptions and bindings section of version .5 of the IMS specification.

He works for a private company called Blackboard Systems who were the

primary technical contractor on IMS standards until January 31, 1999 and

are now a full fledged Investment Member in the IMS.

Mike visited the UK from 1st - 5th March 99, and spent 4th March in

Scotland. In the morning he visited the University of Strathclyde and

met

Niall Sclater (Strathclyde) <n.sclater@strath.ac.uk>

Dave Whittington (Glasgow) <d.whittington@elec.gla.ac.uk>

Iain MacLaren (Paisley) <macl-ph0@NIS-tradewind.paisley.ac.uk>

Julian Newman (Glasgow Caledonian) <jne@gcal.ac.uk>

Patrick Walder (Paisley) <paw@juno42.paisley.ac.uk>

John McQuillan (Paisley) (jlm@juno42.paisley.ac.uk)

in the afternoon he visited the University of Edinburgh and met

Charles Duncan (Edinburgh) <c.duncan@ed.ac.uk>

Mario Antonioletti (Edinburgh) < Mario.Antonioletti@ed.ac.uk>

Martin Morrey (Edinburgh) <mwm@met.ed.ac.uk>

Jean Ritchie (Napier) <j.ritchie@ed.ac.uk>

John MacColl (Edinburgh) <john.maccoll@ed.ac.uk>

during a videoconference session he spoke with the following people from

Heriot-Watt

Patrick McAndrew <patrick@icbl.hw.ac.uk>

Andy Crofts <andyc@icbl.hw.ac.uk>

Nora Mogey <nora@icbl.hw.ac.uk>

Stuart Nicol <stuart@icbl.hw.ac.uk>

2) Mike described what he has been doing and his reasons for visiting

the UK:

2.1 One reason for visiting the UK was to discuss the IMS specification

for packaging of content of learning packages.

2.2 Another reason was to look for collaborators who had learning

packages who were willing to try to move the content of their systems

into the packaging specification. Stuart Nicol said that the project he

was working on could look at the packaging spec, and try to implement it.

2.3 Mike hoped to have a working prototype in a few weeks, which he

would send out for comments. He was looking for people who would commit

to providing comments.

2.4 The packaging specification aims to allow medium grained transfer

of content between different learning systems. Mike hopes people will

read the spec and think if their content could be made to fit it. He

also wants people to try to use the spec to transfer detailed content.

2.5 Question and test interoperability. Test questions are very

dependent on context and hard to reuse. However a test generator is

part of the Blackboard tools. Mike had looked at the CVU assessment

engine and had been impressed by it. He reported that there are AI

based test generators in the US.

2.6 Mike's aim is to enable different systems to be able to use a

variety of test generators. These might be based on QML and TML

(Question Markup Language, Test Markup Language). There is a Technical

team workgroup on Test. Andy Croft has joined this group. CND suggested

that Tests are a special case of Content; it was agreed there are about

10 types of questions; eg a test on molecular structure is hard to

define rules for marking this; it would be possible to define results

however.

2.7 The Metadata specification had remained essentially unchanged for 18

months. He pointed out the need to equivalence concepts not words (eg

there are 2 sorts of river in France; just searching for 'river' only finds half

of them).

John MacColl asked whether the metadata spec takes care of library

needs, eg cataloguing and information services. IMS have the goal to

encompass catalogue information. It would be useful to know if the

terms chosen are congruent with those used for library data. But, they

want non-librarians to be able to create metadata.

It was pointed out by Andy Croft that metadata for questions can be

bigger than the question itself. Mike agreed that it must take no

longer than 3 minutes with a template, or 10 minutes with raw form, to

create metadata.

One way to make people want to create metadata is to use it to meter use

of content, and hence enable charging for content. Also, libraries

could create metadata.

Patrick McAndrew pointed out that EEVL tags resources, and holds tags

as a separate database. They have an EPSRC project which is using

natural language to explain metadata to people; they are looking at IMS.

2.8 Mike wants to get key features put back into the IMS model. These

include groups (virtual classrooms); and collaborations (tutorials,

virtual labs, multi-user collaborations).

2.9 Universities are now sending more active participants to IMS

meetings and this is beginning to bear fruit. Ken Schwaller had

presented a paper at the last meeting which re-stated the collaboration

support features of .5; this had been accepted.

2.10 Mike wants to find and fix problems with the metadata and

packaging specs before the specs are voted on, because after that they

will be harder to change.

2.11 BlackBoard now has 48 employees; Its hosted classroom site is

available for free and universities can purchase their own servers for a fee, of about

$5,000. Blackboards strategic partners chose them for a variety of reasons but

their IMS leadership has a strong influence on this decision.

Mike was partly in the UK as a representative of BlackBoard; there would

soon be a mirror site in the UK where the Blackboard software would be

available; in the meantime people could look at www.blackboard.com

Faculty, ie academics, were invited to use the Blackboard software at

that site; the idea is that once they have started to use it and like it

they will encourage their institutions to buy a licence.

The licence for the Blackboard server software costs $5,000US per

Year. The hosted version at www.blackboard.com software runs on an Ultra

Enterprise 450, and is currently is serving over 1,000 classes on a single server.

Another product, Java based, is an application server; it will be designed for very big users; Blackboard's Campus product is going into beta over the summer. It is scheduled for a January, 1999 release. The general targets for .5 type of functionality and granular interoperability will take approximately two years to attain.

The Campus product is designed to interface with university Intranet administration systems, such as PeopleSoft. These interfaces are difficult to build, and tend to be unique to every installation.

The Blackboard systems aim to support large numbers of concurrent users.

Mike suggested using Kerberos as the basis for authentication, enabling

student tracking . He though Kerberos would scale. It was important to

keep users close to content, and caches were necessary. The work Mike

will be doing over the summer and autumn should provide a good answer as to the

scalability of Kerberos for this type of application.

2.12 Mike had not heard of ATHENS, and JR agreed to send him details of

NISS and ATHENS. He reported that issues of authentication were

'stalled' at IMS.

2.13 JR agreed to send email details of people Mike had met, in the order he had met them.