Standards to Support National Cooperation in Applying Technology to VET
Traditionally, learning takes place in an environment where verbal and non-verbal cues between teachers and students, and between students, aid the learning process. In an online learning system these cues are not present in the normal sense and tools are required to support techniques that go some way in simulating classroom learning. Business products that support collaborative project development between remote knowledge workers support some of the interactive cues and are readily adaptable to online learning and flexibility in training delivery.
These products are loosely termed Groupware and are a class of software products that enable remote groups of people and people connected together on a LAN or WAN to access documents and share tasks such as writing, editing and contributing comments in a controlled way.
Groupware products encompass both Web technology and PC video conferencing.
This type of software is essential for VET flexible delivery objectives as it provides the following benefits:
Groupware that has enabled interoperability within organisations is well established and works well, but to achieve the VET objectives of interoperability for flexible delivery of learning materials, interoperability - particularly for administrative functions - across organisational boundaries is required.
The use of Groupware is well established and many different products are used in the national base.
The current status is summarised in the following table:
| Application Objectives | Key Success Factors | No. of students | No. sites | Metro/ Regional ? | Existing Technology/ Standards | |
| NSW TAFE | Internet based delivery of education | NEIT | Regional | MS FrontPage, however this
is not a standard
Share Vision where ISDN links are not available |
||
| SA DETAFE | WebCT being used for online delivery incorporates elements of groupware | Effective online learning
Preparation for workplace |
2300 concurrent enrolm'ts | 60
campuses on intranet and Internet |
50/50 | TCP/IP |
| Vic TAFE | Admin operations | 800 | Groupwise WP office (Ex Novell Perfect Office) First Class |
|||
| WA Great Southern Reg College | Internal staff communication, meeting scheduling, task management, bookings of resources | "Time-shift" convenience | 4000 | 100 | Regional Albany, Katanning, Mt Barker |
LAN Novell Groupwise Lotus Notes Trials of Web CT, Learning Space |
| Qld | Admin, meeting scheduling | 5000+ | Lotus organiser C Coningham Mail Lotus Notes RecFind |
|||
| NT | Admin, scheduling, calendar | Groupwise |
Collaborate work and distance learning over the Internet will grow rapidly. Application suites that enable seamless interoperability of group work scheduling, document manipulation and management, and audio and video conferencing will be required for effective workgroup activities. Proprietary application suites, often based on available standards are meeting this market demand.
The established Groupware suites, Lotus Notes, MS Exchange, Netscape's Collabra Share, Novell's GroupWise, are being joined by a new group of vendors: Attachmate Corp's OpenMind, Digital's TeamLinks Office, Mesa's Conference+, Oracle's InterOffice, SoftArc's FirstClass, TeamWare's TeamWare and Uniplex's onGo Office.
This plethora of groupware suites can be interpreted as a real world indication of current unsophisticated market demand for groupware, and until the customer base determines what functionality is essential in groupware to support business needs, and understands how to use it effectively, a bewildering array of features will continue to be produced.
Aiding and abetting the development of groupware products is the increasing take-up of Internet access by the general community and the integration of web technology with groupware product suites. In conjunction with that is the imminent standardisation of a 2Mb/s ADSL product (G-Lite). G-Lite will provide a 2Mb/s capacity from premises to the Internet. It is expected that the G-Lite product will be priced so that 2Mb/s ADSL will become a commodity product within the general community living in Metropolitan areas. The transmission capability in non-metropolitan areas will continue to lag behind metropolitan capability.
The advanced features of commercial groupware products are ahead of the standards bodies. With maturity in the market, however, a reduction of products will occur through industry shakeout. The use of open standards underlying the products will lead to improved interoperability between vendor products. Already, some effort is being made by some commercial developers to establish standards which will ensure long term interoperability, thus guaranteeing that after the sectors' honeymoons have passed, there will be extensive use of Internet facilities as replacements of paper based systems. Macromedia, for instance, has approached the educational market with such a strategy, looking to grow the market rather than take a small proprietary-bound share of what currently exists.
Improvements in functionality and interoperability transparency between basic functions are occurring, eg, word processing. The current capability for interworking is however not perfect: for example, Word 6 on Windows 95 cannot read Word documents prepared in Office 97. Significant costs can arise when it is necessary to convert documents between different products and even between different versions of the same product.
It is not appropriate to recommend groupware vendor products as VET standards; however it is appropriate to identify processes and interfaces critical to achieve VET objectives and to recommend functionality standards for groupware to support interoperability of those critical processes and interfaces. Figure 1 is a high level diagram of the groupware concept with the important functional blocks depicted. It can be seen that the groupware concept provides a common interface into a number of discrete functional building blocks that have, in some instances, emerging standards for interoperability. Examples include Calendars, Meeting Schedular Document Management, Address Lists, etc. These standards are generally open standards.
PC based Video Conferencing, Workflow and Document Management products are becoming assimilated into the groupware class. Multimedia applications and Internet-enabled products are facilitating the ready acceptance of these products.
Standards for some of the functional blocks accessed by the groupware applications have been set in the ITU arena and these open standards are replacing proprietary standards. For example, the core standards established for video conferencing are T.120, H320, H323, H324 and major vendors are bringing out products based upon these standards. For example, MS NetMeeting is based upon the T.120 standards.
The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) has developed standards for calendars and address lists and The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has posted memos on further standards development of Calendars and Address Cards. W3C is entering the arena with a particular emphasis on the use of Internet for collaboration.
We can expect robust, industry-supported standards to start emerging from those groups within a short time.
The use of a single groupware product across the nation would have benefits in reduced training and improved interoperability. On the other hand the actual cost of migration to a single product may be higher than the expected benefits. The use of a single product would also restrict the ability of administrations to innovate. The immediate business need is for administrations to interoperate and to do this well, a VET Intranet interconnecting the functional blocks, as shown in Figure 2 is practically essential.
The Workshop also identified the need for an overall Groupware Service Provider to ensure interoperability.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) puts a shell around VET, moves the firewalls from individual institutions to the wall of the shell whilst still maintaining firewalling for key administrative functions.
The business drivers for a VET VPN are:
Linking a VET VPN to AARNET and other State initiatives may add considerable value to the VET sector.
Within that concept of VPN and groupware, value assessment by the State Technical Experts has identified 5 high priority functions for standards. These are:
1. Directory Services
2. Search Engines
3. Process Management
4. Scheduling and calendar
5. Discussion capability
as a basis for interworking of components between collaborating institutes and the VET Groupware Service Provider.
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Last modified on May 05, 1999.