[AI] All: Please review CourseID draft and e-mail comments to Keith. http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/keith/i2/drafts/draft-courseid-offering-unique-id-01.htm.
[AI] All: Please review Tom Barton’s draft as a foundation for EduCourse document discussion. http://middleware.internet2.edu/courseid/docs/draft-internet2-courseID-eduCourse-01.html

MACE-CourseID Conference Call Oct. 11, 2004
*Attendees*
Keith Hazelton, U. Wisconsin
Fred Breshears, UC – Berkeley
Scott Cantor, OSU
Bob Morgan, U. Washington
Grace Agnew, Rutgers
Jeanette Fielden Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2

*Discussion*
Fred has had some interesting discussions with the British Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk/) about how the large amount of introductory course content they have could be utilized on other campuses. They have around 200 courses with about $600 million worth of course content, which nets to approximately $85 million a year.

The desire is to find a way to make the content accessible without having to send students off their own campus sites, yet reassuring the content provider that the materials will be paid for by students enrolled in the courses, without relying on DRM to stop people from making photocopies. One solution proposed is moving the tollgate. A course materials fee is charged by the university to every student enrolled in the course with the university passing it along to the content provider. The goal is to avoid students being sent off to multiple content management systems from different providers to get materials for a single course. The IMS quarterly meeting will be at the home of the British Open University November 8-12, 2004. http://www.imsglobal.org/calendar.cfm.

Faculty buy-in can be gained by emphasizing the notion of digital textbooks that they design, select, and extend. They gain flexibility and do not loose control or academic freedom over teaching material choices.

Scott feels moving to authenticated model is preferable and the fee model doesn’t address the concern about piracy by people other than the class enrollees. An authenticated model addresses that concern better since moving content, especially multimedia content, and making endless copies does not scale well. The concern is not over the federated situation but how to articulate and abstract permissions and authority within a campus so it can be applied consistently across different services and applications that share consistent policies. It can’t be placed into a CMS because users would not have access to everything they need. A help desk trying to deal with scattered services would be extremely difficult. The data modeling become extremely important.

Vendor interoperability is a separate area of concern. How WebCT and Blackboard can talk to each other on a single application server is a complex issue. There is only one IMS specification, simple sequencing, on how the database would work. All other IMS specifications are data-interoperability specifications. The asynchronous approach to message brokers does not receive as much attention as synchronous, though it should.

A point of view to consider is that a small number of courses are a large percentage of the course enrollments. At Berkeley 100 of 3400 courses offered account for half of enrollment. A digital text can have a lot of material and be self-contained. This is a different perspective than most librarians utilize.

The various perspectives need to be considered. The desired end result is to avoid multiple calls from a user to access to each new item added for a course. How the items for a course are managed, not just having access to the course, is a critical consideration within the campus itself, not just between campuses. When other services are involved, not just the textbook, that when the scale of the courses becomes particularly problematic.

Please review the CourseID draft on the website. http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/keith/i2/drafts/draft-courseid-offering-unique-id-01.htm. Keith is in the process of revising it and the new draft will be posted when it’s available.

The discussion regarding the EduCourse documents can be initiated via e-mail. Tom Barton’s document can be used as the starting point for discussions. http://middleware.internet2.edu/courseid/docs/draft-internet2-courseID-eduCourse-01.html.

Questions to consider:
How do we bring use cases back in now that they're no longer in the Unique ID draft?
What is the minimal covering set of documents?
What are the use cases driving things?

Grace suggested asking universities using learning management systems to supply use cases.

Fred suggested that a new IMS specification: Resource List Interoperability (RLI) Specification version 1.0. would be useful to review. If you have a list of resources and you want students authenticating to a LMS, how do they get proper access?
The specification is at: http://www.imsglobal.org/rli/rliv1p0/imsrli_confv1p0.html