Multinational Federated ADL Search and Retrieval - II: Sharing Across NATO

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative of the United States Department of Defense (DoD), the Norwegian Defence Education Command (NoDEC) and the Canadian Defence Academy (CDA) are engaged in a joint effort to develop an infrastructure to allow multiple NATO nations to search, discover, view, and share technical and instructional content. This capability provides near real-time delivery of training and performance support for common interest information that is tailored to the specific requirements of a given instance. This paper reports our progress on a project initially described at I/ITSEC 2008. This project revolutionizes access to multiple heterogeneous repositories containing learning objects distributed across different countries. By incorporating an instance of the Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA), the ADL-Registry, learning objects across all registered repositories are uniquely identified so they can be discovered globally without the limitation of requiring a specific content repository system. This also leaves the total control of learning objects to local repositories. Upon their discovery, learning objects, regardless of their physical locations and countries of origin, can be easily viewed, retrieved, and constructed into training materials according to learning and training objectives and uploaded into SCORM and non-SCORM-compliant learning management systems (LMSs) from any participating nation. The main benefits of the project are to share learning assets and knowledge, provide instant access to learning objects, reduce or eliminate the cost of developing redundant content, and increase collaboration and cooperation among participating nations. The paper also recommends basic requirements for additional participation in the infrastructure.