• Donna Baranski-Walker SRI
• Deborah Bond-Upson Knowledge Universe
• Geoffrey Fox Syracuse University (NCSA Alliance)
• Carolyn Gale Vanderbilt
• Roscoe Giles Boston (NCSA Alliance)
• Jacqueline Haynes Intelligent Automation Inc.
• Charles Kerns Stanford Learning Lab
• Sangeeta Mathur Purdue
• Dennis Newman IMS
• Rob Pannoni SERA Learning Technologies
• Joel Plutchak Univ. Illinois Urbana
• Denise Whitelock Open University UK

Proposal Goal: Develop requirements for tools and systems that support and enable the creation of communities and collaborative learning and that are pedagogically and community inclusive

• These requirements should span K-12 through corporate training
• Use existing (partial) frameworks such as IMS requirements document and Educational Object Economy

• The quality in terms of functionality and universal accessibility of educational community tools will be enhanced if they are built in terms of a common framework
• This will allow system builders to develop modular reusable interoperable components leading to richer systems which will naturally benefit users
• Frameworks consist of requirements, specifications, standards and reference implementations. This project just focuses on requirements
• Current frameworks such as IMS have been largely driven by higher education and there is particular value in identifying special needs of K-14 community.

• Requirements can later lead to technical specifications and standards (as in IMS project), pilot projects and reference implementations
• Project will define requirements and not specifications
• Compare with ADL which sets DoD training requirements and IMS sets consequent specifications
• Requirements can include those for both interoperability and functionality
• IMS focuses on interoperability
• This project is not defining requirements for authoring (i.e. for content) but rather for the interfaces of content with educational tools
• Rapid changes in technology suggest that content and tools be as modular as possible
• This project will define modules and interfaces
• It is likely that K-14 tools and systems will often share components with larger/better funded areas such as Enterprise Systems (cf. Lotus Notes), Corporate training and generic web capabilities
• Interoperability, Reusability, promotion of best practices are natural themes
• Need to be pedagogically neutral as many approaches are being and still need to be investigated
• Tools should include those for teachers (e.g. aid decision making) as well as students
• Include synchronous and asynchronous collaboration
• Assessment requirements should include interactive feedback
• Need to support both evolutionary and revolutionary approaches
• If we were building a Java based system, these requirements would eventually lead to a "Java Framework for Collaborative Educational Tools" with defined interfaces
• In CORBA one talks about the properties and methods of educational objects (cf. DoD Advanced Distributed Learning ADL) and a vertical "CORBA facility for Collaborative Educational Tools"

• The project is not directly research but it will be guided by education theory in terms of identifying and classifying requirements.
• This guidance should be "theory and pedagogy neutral" so that it has the necessary universal acceptance
• Conversely the project will help education research by allowing researchers to exploit a common system infrastructure into which new modules can be inserted and evaluated quickly.
• Building such common system infrastructure is a natural follow on project

• The project is intrinsically multidisciplinary and we need a careful strategy to get broad but not overwhelming participation
• We intend to reach out from the consortia -- CILT PACI IMS -- already involved. Possible relevant organizations to be contacted include:
• Western Governor's University
• Dept. of Education/Commerce Challenge grant holders
• NSF Systemic Initiative grantees
• IEEE P1484 Standard group
• National Center for Education Statistics
• ADL -- DoD Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative
• DoD Schools and participants in DoD CAETI project
• Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)
• Personal Contacts (Scholastic, Open University in UK contacts, Israel, Mexico, Asia (Peking Univ.)

• This describes a 8-10 month program culminating in a draft document for public review:
• document will detail requirements of tools used to build and sustain collaborative learning communities with special attention to particular needs of K-14
• First 2 Months:
• Set up mail list
• Current participants and others from this workshop and elsewhere
• Establish web site of relevant resources
• Allow anybody to add links
• Produce Executive Summary
• Write NSF SGER Proposal (in coordination with IMS proposals in the same arena)
• Ongoing Activity -- plan requirements workshop
• Next 2-4 Months: identify and invite those who should participate in requirements workshop.
• Use a collection of consortia such as CILT, PACI, ADL to identify people.
• Cover Industry, Government, Academia, Users, Developers, International ...
• Executive Summary and web site used to explain project
• Although workshop participants should come from all communities we need to assume a base knowledge base and so we expect participants to be experts -- although general users should have advocates at meeting
• After 6-8 months (November 98 -- January 99), hold an invitational requirements workshop for some 60 participants

• 60 participants
• 2 to 2.5 days
• Initial day or so: invited talks from different points of view but on the common theme of requirements for tools and systems that support and enable the creation of communities and collaborative learning
• Rest of meeting: multiple working groups (around 4-8 in number) meet in parallel to refine pedagogically and community neutral requirements in various areas
• cf. Break up of ADL discussion November 97
• Produce draft report -- "The Public Requirements Document:"

• Internal comments for 2-3 months after requirements workshop
• Then hold a small meeting including discussion leaders from previous workshop. This meeting produces a document which is available for public comment
• This document and previous summaries can be used to organize a variety of birds of a feather or equivalent sessions in a range of conferences covering different constituencies.
• This helps process to be exposed to broad community

We have defined a process, which will investigate requirements for learning community tools and produce a draft reference document. This could be followed by several different types of activities:

1. Refine Requirements
2. Turn requirements into specifications, reference implementations (of common system infrastructure) and pilot projects
3. Turn requirements document and associated web site into an educational and evangelical resource which can be used by broad range of people interested in understanding capabilities of current or future tools