(photo by depone of flickr)

Scott Leslie blogged about a new wiki he set up to keep track of content conversion tools for course management systems. He is asking for help to complete it. 

This is necessary since no two CMS support import and export in exactly the same way. We have felt Scott's pain, the .LRN LORS (Learning Object Repository Service) package had to have special import procedures for each version of Blackboard we wanted to support import from.  It looks like there is still a long way to go in learning content interoperability.  

The cynical view is that there is very little ecconmic driver for any particular vendor to really get the bugs out of thier export.  Yes, it has to exist on the spreadsheet, work in the sales demo, or the product won't be bought. However, its years after the system is installed before users really start using export and by then the CMS Vendor has thier money.

What could cause this to change? I think the moves towards "Digital Markets" for text books and other course content. I imagine a world where content could be bought by the chapter or article and proprietry content could be "mixed" with open content.  All of a sudden the major content providors will have an economic incentive to help teachers "Remix" thier materials.  Furthermore, there will quite a bit of economic value in having an instructor's course exported and sold, remixed, by other instructor's.

In that world, I bet the CMS vendors will suddenly be able to get thier imports and exports to work.