CMI 5 Working Group Meeting Minutes December 19th, 2014

CMI 5 Working Group Meeting Minutes - December 19th, 2014

Attendees

• William A. McDonald – Boeing Flight Services
• Andy Johnson – ADL
• Alex Horan – RipTide Software
• Vijay Budhran - RipTide Software
• Pankaj Agrawal – Next Software Solutions
• Bruno Edmond – National Research Council (of Canada)
• Chad Lowman – Black & Veatch
• Art Werkenthin - RISC
• Henry Ryng – INXSOL
• Ben Clark – Rustici Software

If I missed anyone, please let me know…

Notes

CMI-5 Course Packaging

The group continued its discussion of content packaging.
It was generally agreed that there should be a content package to be used as a container for learning content media and the course structure XML file.

The following decisions were made regarding course packages for CMI-5:

• “Section 8.0 Course Package” – will be added to the CMI-5 Course Structure specification to describe the requirements for a course package.
• The course package will be required to be either ZIP32 or ZIP64 file format (i.e. “a ZIP file”)
• The Course Structure XML will be included in the ZIP file and content media files MAY be included also.
• Content files contained in the ZIP file will be referenced by the Course XML using relative references
• LMS systems will be required to be able to ingest either ZIP32 or ZIP64

Ben Clark will research the appropriate ZIP32/ZIP64 specification reference

The group also spent time discussions the merits of a package (without content) requiring fully qualified URLs or not.

The issue is that many LMS systems that ingest ZIP packages (like in SCORM) using a browser POST as a means of file transfer.
This type of file transfer is very limiting for extremely large course media and users often post a “content-less” package and then transfer the content media files separately using FTP (or etc.) as a workaround. In this scenario a Course Structure file with relative references might be useful.

This issue will likely warrant future discussion, but the prevailing view was as follows:

• Course Package = Zip file + XML file (+ sometimes content)
• If the XML course structure has RELATIVE references, then content is in the package.
• Package without content must have explicit URLs.
• LMS may import an Course Structure XML directly without a ZIP
• The “workaround” scenario was seen as less necessary and may cause interoperability issues.

Next Meeting

PLEASE NOTE: We will not be meeting on Dec 26th (Next week due to the holiday season). Unless otherwise specified, the next meeting will be:

Jan 2nd, 2015 – 10:30am US Eastern Time