Written by: James Burke
Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Press release relating to previous entry on IMS Common Cartridge...

Lake Mary, FL 22 January 2008 - The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) today announced the launch of a new project that will produce a community source testing tool for the Common Cartridge (CC) format. Nine industry-leading organizations have agreed to be the anchor investors in the project, sponsored by the Common Cartridge Alliance. Those organizations include: ANGEL Learning, eCollege, JISC, McGraw-Hill, Microsoft, The Open University United Kingdom, Pearson Education and Ucompass.com.

The Common Cartridge Alliance is a community of interested organizations and individuals  promoting adoption of the CC format, including developing and sharing community source tools. The clarion call of CC of “Free the Content” reflects the benefits offered to end-users and learning delivery organizations in terms of cross-platform support, content portability and more effective learning materials.

The Common Cartridge format is based on the world’s most widely used specifications for interchange of learning content and assessments: IMS Content Packaging and IMS QTI. CC also includes standards for metadata, discussion forum initiation, content authorization, and data exchange with web learning applications. CC enables interchange of the digital materials used to support online or hybrid learning, that utilizes an instructor.