On the Role of Technical Standards for Learning Technologies

This paper presents some of the lessons that we have learned during our involvement with the development of learning technology standards. We believe that the decision to develop a new standards is sometimes taken too quickly and that, when possible, existing generic standards should be profiled for the domain of learning. At this point in time, the development of tools, technologies and methodologies that fully exploit the affordances of existing standards is more relevant than the development of new standards. Moreover, we believe that the relationship between technical standardization and research is often misunderstood: the main role of standards for research is to enable a large-scale technological infrastructure that promotes innovation through its open nature.