| What people are saying about Common Cartridge
"The business need for the CommonCartridge is quite simple. If our industry can reduce obstacles for content interoperability investment in producing very basic online courses can shift towards designing courses that support the vision of personalized instruction around learning outcomes. Without a well established open standard for content and support from key educational technology players, we'll languish. Our strategy at ANGEL is to provoke this positive change by our commitment to shipping support for CommonCartridge. We challenge other industry players to match our pace for the good of the industry."– Ray Henderson, Chief Products Officer, ANGEL Learning
"Cengage Learning is working to evolve the way that students learn by partnering with instructors to provide a wide range of digital content and services. The "common cartridge" extends the Cengage Learning focus to create, protect, and deliver quality content consistently across learning management systems for instructors and students. Cengage Learning has partnered to develop engaging products for this emerging standard and is actively testing our titles to prove compatibility. We are pleased to continue our support of the common cartridge standard."– Jonathan Stowe, Senior Vice President, Academic and Professional Group, Cengage Learning "Course management systems have become mission-critical applications in support of academic programs at universities. Common Cartridge will help enrich course sites and provide students with digital textbooks and supplementary materials for learning and assessment. The emerging Common Cartridge standard, by providing easy access and inter-operable tools, should increase student time-on-task, the factor most closely correlated with improved learning."– Charles F. Leonhardt, Principal Technologist, Georgetown University |
IMS Alliances are for the purpose of ensuring interoperability in practice and keeping implementing organizations current on the evolution of a specific set of IMS standards. Alliances were established at the request of the IMS members. The IMS members wanted support to make reliable interoperability a reality and wanted to avoid the need for every implementing organization to reinvest in the tools, processes, and interactions to integrate with every platform. In the Alliance IMS provides this support at a fraction of the cost and, most importantly, steps in on an ongoing basis to resolve issues that arise.
Under the Alliances, IMS provides extensive support to implement conformant products. When testing is completed, IMS issues a conformance mark that IMS stands behind. What this means is that IMS will get involved directly in any issues that arise and work across organizations to resolve.
Joining in the Alliance and working through the process in the only way to achieve official IMS conformance. Conformance seals are only issued to and maintained with current IMS Alliance, Affiliate and Contributing Members. IMS does this in order to deliver on interoperability in practice on an ongoing basis. This benefits large and small organizations alike in creating and maintaining a vital, innovative, and open marketplace for educational technology products! 
The Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability™ Alliance has been created as a high value community for those involved in implementing Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) through a primarily online engagement with experts from the IMS member organizations, IMS staff, and a large variety of resources shared by the participants. End-user organizations are also heavily involved in the Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability Alliance because IMS staff facilitate collaborative projects among institutions, school districts, and suppliers that are looking to scale the effective use of digital resources and applications.
Joining the Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability Alliance provides tremendous leverage because it is extremely low cost and the resources made available through the alliance are 98% subsidized by the IMS Contributing Member organizations. Joining the alliance is a great way to show your support for the work of IMS without a large expenditure of money or resources. In fact, the return on investment from the provided resources and support is large.
The Alliance focuses on the Common Cartridge (CC) and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specifications, along with the IMS broader family of 'content' specifications; namely, Content Packaging (CP), Question & Test Interoperability (QTI) and Learning Design (LD).
See who is implmenting Common Cartridge and Basic Learning Tools Interoperability.
Membership in the Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability Alliance is the only way to achieve official conformance to the Common Cartridge (CC) and Learning Tools Interoperability standards. Digital content or learning platforms must exhibit the marks shown here, signifying achievement of the official conformance process, to be compliant to IMS Common Cartridge. Products without these marks are not considered to be compliant by IMS GLC.
Those products which have passed conformance tests and received IMS issued registration numbers are eligible to display the IMS Certified Logo. Visit the current registrations page to determine the exact certification.
Conformance tests are available for: Common Cartridge, Learning Tools Interoperability, Learning Information Services, and Interactive White Board/ Common File Format.
You can browse the available products and see which have been awarded a conformance mark in the Common Cartridge/ Learning Tools Inteorperability Conformance Directory. Learn about Conformance. Read the Primer on Common Cartridge Conformance for End-User Institutions, Faculty, and Buyers of Educational Content and Learning Platforms
In addition to notices issued by IMS Global Learning Consortium (e.g. press releases or the IMS monthly Dispatch), the Alliance exploits these communication channels:
The Common Cartridge (CC) standard distils state-of-the-art practice in online education and training into an easy-to-implement format for creating and sharing digital content. It defines an integrated approach to exchanging content exploiting:
A consistent model for packaging content.
Metadata (based on simple Dublin Core).
Assessment (harnessing a commonly used set of question types).
Additional features such as discussion topics and authorization for protected content.
Version 1.1 of Common Cartridge introduces support for LTI, a subset of the functionality offered by the Learning Tools Interoperability specification.
Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)™
IMS LTI complements the Common Cartridge standard with access to rich, web-based applications or Tools embedded into cartridges with active, authenticated links back to the centrally hosted content. High stakes or premium content can be integrated into specific learning contexts and support the retrieval of results, making the value of eBooks and online content a reality. For more information on LTI visit: Learning Tools Interoperability Video Overview Download the Learning Tools Interoperability specification, and alliance members can check out the LTI conformance test.
Question & Test Interoperability (QTI)
QTI is widely implemented as the basis for a whole range of assessment applications, test content, and services around the world. As a key component of Common Cartridge, access to QTI information and resources (including development tools, QTI players, and code libraries), as well as forthcoming profiling and conformance resources for the v2.1 specification are availalbe to the CC & LTI Alliance. For more information about QTI and its current status as a developing specification visit: the QTI page.
The CC & LTI Alliance is an online community of vendors, user institutions and practitioners committed to advancing the use of the IMS family of content-related specifications encompassing:
Common Cartridge (CC).
Content Packaging (CP).
Question & Test Interoperability (QTI).
Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI).
Goals
Current Resources available for community members
Free-to-use CC Test System
Valid cartridge test data set
Tools, test harnesses and sample code
CC & LTI Alliance logo and marketing materials
Access to unreleased draft specifications
Open content example cartridges
Join the CC & LTI Alliance
Join the Common Cartridge & Learning Tools Interoperability Alliance and begin taking advantage of the benefits described above. Sign up now online.
CC & LTI Alliance Members
See the list of CC & LTI Alliance members and the growing community of educational institutions and vendors committed to proliferating the CC standard.
Common Cartridge Testing
The CCv1.0, CCv1.1 and CC v1.2 test system is available free-of-charge at http://validator.imsglobal.org for you to test cartridges. Conformance is only granted to Members, Affiliates and Alliance members.
Learning Tools Interoperability Testing
The LTI v1.0 test system is made available to CC/LTI Alliance members. The test system generates a comprehensive report of any non-conformance issues detected. Alliance Members can access the tool.
Common Cartridge Information
Presenters: Dr. Agueda Gras-Velazquez (European Schoolnet) and Kati Clements (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)
During a Summer School organized by the ASPECT project, 40 mathematics and science teachers from Portugal, Lithuania, Romania and Portugal were asked to work with different content packaging standards. The teachers were very enthusiastic about Common Cartridge content packaging. After importing a CC package into Moodle, the teachers could remove parts that they did not need, edit the content and change the order of different resources. Many teachers requested instructions on how to adapt Moodle to use Common Cartridge packages and some teachers expressed an interest in using Common Cartridge to package their own content in order to share it with other teachers.
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