What open standards should my software adhere to?
Selecting standards-compliant software could be extremely important to your school today and in the future. As your information system grows in complexity, the management overhead costs of supporting many disparate applications may become staggering. Which Open Standard will be most important for your school? Which one is supported today by vendors that are relevant to your situation? Which one is likely to be most relevant in the future? Will one standard win the standards race and subsume the others? The answers to these questions come from understanding your needs, doing your research, and working with vendors who are able to provide a total open solution.
You are probably already using software that adheres to standards such as html, ODBC, or ASCII. Other open standards have evolved for the instructional environment for different reasons. The Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) was designed for the K-12 instructional and administration area. IMS standards were designed for the needs of higher education, and the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM) was developed with the needs of the industrial training and certification market in mind.
If you need to collect student performance or completion data from an educational application and pass it to another application, consider adhering to SCORM compliances. If you need to access student enrollment records across the enterprise, SIF compliance is key. If you are indexing courseware and e-learning components, especially in higher education, IMS plays a role.
It is a good idea to be aware of future developments. Compliance may not matter with the software you own today, but if you are installing an enterprise system, assuring standards compliance will increase your flexibility in the future as specialized applications or even open source applications become available.
