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Lance Speelmon described this many-to-many problem affecting assessment, LMS, and student information services. There are production requirements for enterprise interoperability in both the DM and KS projects.&nbsp;&nbsp; There are a variety of grade creation and grade entering tools from the open source community (e.g. Sakai) and commercial sources (e.g. Thomson, Blackboard).&nbsp; There are grade books, (i.e., grade stores), as well as systems-of-record (i.e., student information systems) for grades.&nbsp; There was general agreement that the useful boundary is between applications that display grade-dependent information and support creating, entering, reporting grades and systems that retain grades, either temporarily or as permanent records.&nbsp; Note that KS uses a more general notion of learning activities or units and learning outcomes than is generally provided by LMS or SIS systems. Both KS and DM anticipate support for innovative uses of grade information, as well as more fine-grained tracking of results once this capability is made available<br />
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Participants found it easy to identity use cases relating to grading, and this appeared to be a domain of particular interest to higher ed. Gerry Hanley and others acknowledged that there are applications beyond higher ed that require mapping activity to outcome. <br />
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There is community activity around both Sakai and Moodle to create grading service APIs. These APIs will provide an interface to enable what the grade store can do when called by a grading application.&nbsp; There is a Grading OSID, and there may be other candidate interfaces. Substitution / choice of both consumer and provider grading services was a clear use. <br />
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There is an interest in applications to track, monitor, store grading activity for data warehousing, reporting, etc.&nbsp; There are many use cases, CSU mentioned mapping content utilization and outcomes.&nbsp; Integration with other systems, e.g. Turn it In for detecting plagiarism, were mentioned.&nbsp; There is also utility in using real-time grading data, e.g. for advising programs.<br />
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The sense of the meeting seemed to be that this is a well-bounded problem where specific benefit could be shown. However, despite considerable agreement as to what functions are required and multiple implementations of grading, participants indicated that no single standard shows signs of emerging soon. This situation might provide an opportunity for prompt action to have high impact.<br />
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Interested parties in further work on Grading: Lance Speelmon, John Norman, and George Ward (CSU)