2.2 Standards in E-Learning Design, united in the ICOPER Reference model
With respect to e-learning, Cooper and Kraan [6] point out that standards in elearning are important because they can avoid that information gets “locked into a supplier’s product”, and are able to join up different systems because they use the same data backend. While this is particular relevant for interoperability, standardization in e-learning also yields other desirable outcomes, like reusability and reduction of design complexity. In e-learning there are big efforts to create standards that make learning content transferable between technical platforms and educational scenarios. The ICOPER project [37], funded by the European E-Content-Plus program, reflects such a standardization effort on a meta-level, analyzing different standards on different levels and their interoperability. At the core of the project resides the ICOPER Reference Model (IRM) [29] that is based on a rich pool of best practice examples for the successful use of each substandard that concerns technology enhanced learning. It embraces all relevant standards available including content related standards, user modeling standards, interoperability standards as well as process oriented standards. The IRM, in its purpose to agglomerate various e-learning standards into a functional concept, shows promising directions, because it helps avoid the hazard of using standards that overlap and cause redundancies, as well as conflicting standards. In this paper the ICOPER Reference Model is chosen as the starting of the analysis.