IMS Global: What are the unique challenges of working across all the ministries of education? Has this influenced the emphasis of your activities?

ST: The Le@rning Federation, as a collaborative community, is composed of various groups, each with unique responsibilities for the project. Curriculum Corporation, in its management of the Initiative, coordinates these groups which contribute to the collaborative process. There are collaborative groups to: focus on scoping the content within the curriculum priorities; provide feedback through the content design and development process and use of the content within a teaching and learning context; collaborate on specifications, infrastructure, metadata, and intellectual property issues.

The single greatest challenge for Curriculum Corporation is to ensure these groups work effectively in their roles. One impact that impinges on the effectiveness of these groups is an ongoing change to their membership. This can result in a lack of corporate memory for the Initiative. While this can have a refreshing outcome as new minds are welcome to the Initiative, it has also meant that Curriculum Corporation has to ensure new members are well inducted to the objectives and intended outcomes of TLF.

The other challenge is to ensure TLF remains relevant to the priorities of each State, Territory and the New Zealand Government. Over the eight years of the Initiative there has been and will be over 22 elections, all of which have new policy initiatives offered to the electorates.

IMS Global: The Federation is currently in the midst of a two-year goal to create 4,000 items of high quality, globally recognized online content for all Australian and New Zealand schools. How is that project progressing?

ST: Phase 3 spans over three years. The project is progressing well. During Phase 2 TLF established efficient processes to develop its content and we are now reaping the rewards of this experience. In addition, TLF is supplementing its "green-fields" development with quality third-party material sourced from Australian and New Zealand cultural and scientific institutions, publishers, like projects from other countries, and contributions from States, Territories jurisdictions, and the New Zealand ministry.

The proposed infrastructure will support distributed sources of content which broadens our access from the existing content repository called the TLF Exchange. While the emphasis will still be on high quality with TLF maintaining a QA role, other providers will be able to serve the content from their own repositories. This infrastructure will be supported through a registry which leverages the work done by ARROW through the PILIN¹ project. TLF is supporting the content and infrastructure with its ongoing update on specifications, refining quality assurance processes, and negotiating licensing models. All this work is undertaken collaboratively with stakeholders.

¹PILIN - Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure; a collaboration manage by The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) project. http://www.arrow.edu.au/PILIN