Towards a Common Training Architecture for FDL: Description and Definition

Abstract

The DELTA project Common Training Architecture (CTA) is concerned with the harmonisation of technologies that (will be able to) support flexible and distance learning (FDL) and training in a wide sense. Integration of systems and applications suffer from the lack of appropriate standards, the variety of standards that do not interwork correctly, the fact that systems, tools, and applications do not comply to existing standards, etc. It all amounts to technological issues like interoperability, portability and ease of use. The proposals and recommendations to be developed by the CTA start from the consideration of the benefits and support to the various actors in education, learning and training situations. The end-user, say student or trainee, therefore needs special emphasis, but at the same time the embedding in ‘enterprise’ objectives needs to be recognised as important. The latter directs attention to issues of development and authoring, production and delivery. This paper gives a survey of the CTA objectives and the approach that has been developed. It describes the intermediate results, especially that on the development of the framework on educational dimensions and some basic scenarios that contain the requirements for architectural solutions.