Why do we need standards?

Standards are important to our daily life. What if railway tracks were all different sizes? Would you like to change trains every time you met a different section of track? How difficult would it be if not all plugs fitted into all sockets or if one type of card only fitted one type cash machine? Standards are even more important in the technological world. Without standardizing the HTML tags and internet protocols(TCP/IP), it would be impossible to create a feasible browser which means there won't even be a World Wide Web today. Standards are beneficial to designers as well as to users of the products. Once the designers follows certain standards, the users can expect for high quality products that done in the precise format as requested.

Why Stick to Standards in Learning Content Creations?

While designing courseware, educators must keep learning technology standards in mind. Because this is the key to mix and match content from multiple sources thus content experts can develop interchangeable content that can be reused, assembled, and disassembled quickly and easily. This will further ensure the learning technology investments are wise and risk adverse.

Experienced instructional designer Wayne Hodgins proposed a prevalent metaphor, learning standards as LEGO™ product-line. The only way the players of ages can create, deconstruct, and reconstruct LEGO formations easily, precisely and freely is to implement every LEGO piece under and strict standard (the uniformly shaped pins). This will ensure all pieces can always be snapped together with any other pieces regardless to it's size, shape or color.

In general, accredited standards will reduce the risk of making large investments in learning technologies. The current learning management systems and courseware can work in an harmony only if there is proper learning technology standards being used through the content authoring process.

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