1. A recent "Interoperability Review" published by the UK Department for Education estimates that better interoperability of administrative data would save the UK taxpayer £300 million a year.
2. The new UK government plans to decentralise budgets to schools. This makes sense in ensuring that schools will buy software that they value. It is also likely to promote innovation in the market. However, without improved interoperability specifications, decentralised procurement will create barriers to the use of different learning technologies in an integrated classroom environment.

In the light of the widespread consensus on the importance of interoperability, it is disappointing that the DfE remains silent on its strategy in this area. The "Interoperability Review" cited above has criticised the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF), while failing either to engage in meaningful dialogue either with SIFA (which has vigorously rebutted the DfE claims) or with the industry more generally. 

SALTIS Chairman, Crispin Weston, has written an open letter to Lord Hill of Oareford, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools, urging the government to work more closely with industry to end this uncertainty. The letter urges the DfE to create instead a sustainable strategy for interoperability, both of administrative and learning services in our schools.

UK companies which wish to support this letter should bring the matter to the attention of their local constituency Member of Parliament.

1. If we are to create new interoperable sequencing solutions, we need to be clear what it is we are going to sequence. You can't build a wall without first having baked your bricks.
2. If interoperable sequencing is to be worthwhile, then the bricks need to be re-usable. It is widely recognised that SCORM has failed to achieve this holy grail of re-usability, largely due to its failure to "decouple" learning objects from their instructional context.
3. One particular instance of this failure can be seen in the confusion between the "resource" and the "activity". The SCORM content "atom", the "SCO", represents the elision of one activity with one resource. But this happy one-to-one mapping may be the exception rather than the rule: some activities require multiple resources, some require none at all, and some teachers and students wish to access raw assets for use in informal learning or ad-hoc activities.
4. The desire to extend the CMI data model to support immersive, social, creative and gaming pedagogies requires new specifications and  new types of metadata. The difficult part of this process is not creating new labels but in attaching the labels to the right things. This difficulty becomes almost insuperable when we have no common understanding of what are the different objects in our in our digital learning environment to which those labels might be attached.
5. From the teacher's perspective, the basic currency of instruction is the activity, not the resource.