Education reform and its needs for technical standards

This paper discusses some of the leading concepts in education reform and their need for technical standards. It also discusses the efforts by several organizations to develop such standards and specifications, and how new stakeholders can get involved or monitor this work. There are a variety of reform efforts being advocated and pursued by researchers, educators, learning institutions, corporate trainers, and government leaders. Concepts such as student-centered learning, computer-based training, on-line learning, distance learning, just-in-time learning, and self-learning are widely accepted as having the potential to substantially improve the efficiency and effectiveness of learning. All of these concepts have the need for one or more underlying technical standards. This paper describes a number of these standards and the work that is being done to develop them. It is important to note that these technical standards are independent from the content material (known as content standards) that students would be required to learn, as well as from the amount of that content (known as performance standards) a student would be expected to master. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.