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BURLINGTON, Mass. - 11 July 2005 - This year's Distributed Content Demonstrator was a resounding success, taking top honors at alt-i-lab 2005 in Sheffield, UK. Participating in the demonstrator were Giunti Interactive Labs, HarvestRoad, Mac Learning Environments.org and the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.).

alt-i-lab is organized by the IMS Global Learning Consortium in collaboration with a number of affiliate organizations. alt-i-lab 2005 (June 20th - 22nd) was hosted by digital South Yorkshire, attracting over 200 attendees from 14 countries to Sheffield, UK.

The 2005 Distributed Content Demonstration featured digital repository interoperability building on existing published interoperability specifications, including the O.K.I. Repository OSID, IMS Content Packaging, SRW, SCORM and IEEE LOM to name a few. This was presented as a collection of parallel demonstrations showing various kinds of educational tools (authoring, aggregation, search, delivery, etc) interoperating with multiple content repositories utilizing open specifications and standards.

Ed Walker, CEO of IMS, stated that "Enabling teachers, learners, and instructional designers to chose and use content from many sources is one primary goal of the elearning community. It will take some real work to make what was demonstrated at alt-i-lab 2005 an everyday service in learning environments. But this year's demonstrator was a moon-shot that shows technology developers have passed a very important milestone."

The primary message of the demonstrator was consumer choice with respect to educational software, services and content. "The educational software community is fostering a marketplace of software and content, both commercial and open-source, that will allow educational consumers the freedom to choose from a variety of pre-integrated, 'off the shelf,' components." said Jeff Merriman, Project Director of the Open Knowledge Initiative, "The breadth of repositories and applications involved also demonstrates the maturity and utility of OKI's Open Service Interface Definitions and IMS' suite of specifications."

Grame Barty, Managing Director at HarvestRoad added "This level of choice provides the means to establish a global marketplace for institutions or consortia of institutions for educational content. A bit like Google is for search this level of interoperability is for universal access and reuse - which is the next step in e-learning. The key for a deep and far-reaching impact however is for educational materials to be created, stored and managed on a granular level. With technology providers showing the way with these tools its now time for owners of intellectual capital within the education sector to seriously turn their minds to how to do 'granularity' more effectively."

"Initial work in this area such as that of ADL/SCORM and IMS have led to some common definitions and standards for data interchange. New service oriented specifications coming out of the Open Knowledge Initiative, IMS and elsewhere are providing the next level of interoperability and integration specifications required to build a flexible and viable e-learning marketplace," said Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO at Giunti Interactive Labs, presenting their Learn eXact LCMS suite, "The Distributed Content Demonstrator provides a working example of how this kind of consumer choice can be achieved through the application of existing specifications and standards."

About IMS
IMS is a non-profit organization supported by members of a worldwide consortium that includes 50 Contributing Members. The IMS Global Learning Consortium develops open technical specifications to support distributed learning. Its specifications are accessible to everyone at no charge from its website (www.imsglobal.org) and require no licensing fees to implement.

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