RSS: A Learning Technology
By Eva Kaplan-Leiserson

This article is first in a quarterly series of articles that will discuss learning technology trends in the distance or spotlight technology trends and examine their applicability to learning.

Some people call it the next World Wide Web. Some say tools like it will replace LMSs and LCMSs. What is it? RSS, which is known to some as Rich Site Summary, others as RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary, and still others as Really Simple Syndication. But it’s not the acronym that’s important, it’s the result: a means of driving content directly from its producer to its recipient automatically, almost instantaneously, and without interference from viruses, spam, or other modern day electronic pests.

This article will help you understand not only what RSS is, but also why it’s getting the hype it is in the world of content, what its potential is in the learning arena, and how it’s already being used in educational settings.

Definition and history

In her excellent primer on RSS, “What is RSS and Why Should You Care?,” writer, editor, and trainer Amy Gahran describes the technology in a way that non-techies can easily understand. She explains that an RSS “feed” is a type of electronic file written in the XML formatting language (similar to HMTL, but with user-defined parameters), which contains information about content on a Website—for example, a headline and summary or excerpt.  

What makes RSS innovative is the way in which this feed is delivered and used. RSS files are created by content publishers and then delivered to people who have subscribed to that feed using a “feed reader” application (also called a news aggregator). The feed reader program checks with the originator of the content regularly and if it finds any new content available from a particular site, downloads the information about it, called metadata, into the application automatically.

A person can subscribe to multiple feeds using a feed reader and then read, all in one screen, what new feeds have come into the program. He or she can then click on the headline of an item to go to the originating Website and access the full article.

RSS helps users keep up with new content on online news sites and Weblogs (blogs) and can replace email updates or HTML newsletters. Content publishers can notify subscribers of their newest content automatically without having to keep track of email addresses or worrying that an email or HTML newsletter will get lost in the pool of spam and virus-laden messages.

Beyond personal use, RSS feeds can also be used to republish, or syndicate, content on Websites. For example, an electrical engineer who writes a Weblog for his in-house colleagues could syndicate feeds from various electrical engineering publications on the site, and provide the latest news to his readers without composing it himself. This is entirely legal and not a copyright violation because the links to read the content send the user back to the originating site.

RSS was developed in 1999, but it’s taken off recently because of the increasing amount of information people are trying to take in, especially through nontraditional sources such as blogs. Although currently most RSS feeds are text-based and received via a desktop computer, technology experts point out the potential for more flexible use. Audio and video files or other multimedia content can be sent via RSS, and many mobile devices, such as cell phones or PDAs, can receive RSS feeds as well. 

(Note: There are several different standards for RSS currently. See http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/pikie.cgi?RssStandards for more on this. Most reader applications work with multiple standards. Which standard you use to create your own feed depends on what you want to do with it, but experts often recommend version 2.0 for most applications.) 

RSS and learning

It’s not just the ability of RSS to get large amounts of content to people quickly that makes it an useful educational technology. Intrepid pioneers are harnessing the capability of RSS and metadata to do some very exciting things in the learning arena.

Prescient learning technologiest Stephen Downes discussed the usefulness of RSS with online courses back in 2000 in his article “Content Syndication and Online Learning." He wrote, “[Using RSS or similar tools], any course…can tap into up-to-date resources from remote sources…[so that] content is tailored specifically for the course.”

Ways in which instructors can use RSS for or in courses include

• subscribing to feeds on certain topics to stay current
• publishing syndicated content on course Websites or blogs
• having learners create their own blogs and then subscribing to the feeds of all those blogs to check new content on them
• notifying learners about new available courses
• updating learners on new internal or external resources available on a training topic
• subscribing to feeds from learning object repositories to see the newest objects added or objects added in a topic they’re developing a course on.

(Several of those uses were proposed in “Blogging and RSS: The ‘What’s It?’ and “How To’ of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators,” published by Information Today.)

It’s this last use that’s creating the most buzz in the online learning arena, primarily among higher education institutions that are starting to contribute to and benefit from learning object repositories that house and share chunks of content. A growing list of repositories now offer RSS feeds that announce when new objects are added or send search results on keywords or disciplines automatically to aggregator applications or Websites.

At least six repositories around the world offer RSS feeds of learning objects to the public (see resource list). Downes, whose EduSource project is a Canadian network of learning object repositories that’s now going global, says that what constitutes a learning object in these repositories varies based on the person who submitted it. Some are fully contained learning objects that follow the SCORM model; others are plain images. The trick, he says, is to make the metadata sufficiently descriptive so the person accessing it knows what he or she is getting.

Beyond LMSs and LCMSs

Learning object repositories that let users contribute and access objects developed by others outside their organizations haven’t taken off in the corporate world. The model thus far has been to use expensive LMSs and LCMSs to house learning objects and keep them locked up in the companies that developed them. This is perhaps because of proprietary information and intellectual property concerns at businesses. However, what if another model were possible? What if those issues could be worked out and the distributed model of learning object repositories seen in the higher education arena could be transferred to the corporate world?

Rather than collecting content in a central repository, requiring an expensive software application, the RSS model distributes content across the World Wide Web, allowing access piece by piece. “For that reason,” Downes says in his article “An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers” that “the distribution of content over the Internet will look a lot more like an RSS network than…an enterprise content management system.” More people will use the distributed learning object network “not only because it’s easier and cheaper, but because they can access much more content for much less money.”

In 2003, Downes created an RSS format specifically for learning objects, RSS-LOM. In “RSS: The Next Killer App for Education,” author Mary Harrsch says the format will make distribution of learning objects to courses possible without using LMSs or having to work through a publisher. RSS-LOM isn’t implemented in any currently available software, but Downes says products in development will support it. “The age of the LMS is over,” he says. “If you’re going to spend [several hundred thousand dollars], it would make more sense to spend it directly on content.”

Digital rights management tools would make that possible. Downes is developing for eduSource tools and resources to support the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) created by Renato Ianella, for learning object repository networks. The language describes reuse conditions for content—as Downes is using it, whether learning objects can be read, copied, printed, and so forth.

This is all pilot code at the moment, but the vision is that ODRL will work with other software that Downes terms learning object viewers so that when a user requests download of an object, the software consults the ODRL file and, if necessary, takes care of getting payment for the object from credit card data or a PayPal account. Could this type of software solve businesses’ copyright concerns and let learning object repositories flourish in that world? Only time will tell. For more on ODRL and learning objects, see the in-depth paper Downes recently released. 

What’s next?

Downes paints the picture of the future of learning: A “desktop e-learning application that plugs into the learning object repository network and is able to search across a wide number of collections and retrieve exactly the learning you want in a given circumstance.” This application will be incorporated in other software, he says, after the model of EPSS. As the use of RSS and other metadata tools in the learning arena continues to develop, new innovations will appear. One idea that’s still in the conceptual stage is being worked on by Alan Levine,instructional technologist at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction and developer of the Maricopa Learning Exchange (MLX), a collection that includes learning objects as well as activities, ideas, and teaching strategies created by faculty and staff at the 10 Maricopa colleges. He’s working on a way that learning objects can record automatically where they have been used, via the Trackback feature from Moveable Type blog software. 

The information about the object’s use—Website title, URL, date, and brief blurb—becomes part of the metadata on the object so that people downloading it can see its prior contexts. Currently in the MLX, people can enter this information manually, but beyond the Trackback feature in blog software, there are no authoring tools out there yet that can send that information back to repositories automatically. Levine wrote about Trackback on his Weblog, “[Keeping track of the object’s use] is rather important in my mind. The object is now registering where else it is being used. It proves reusability, one of the holy learning object grails!”

In a 2003 presentation with others at the MERLOT International Conference, Levine said that what’s really needed are “intuitive authoring tools to transfer learning objects from collections to instructional environments” (and that would register back how they’re being used).

Currently, learning objects gathered from repositories must be manually downloaded and integrated. Downes says that process often takes lots of “tweaking, poking, and prodding.” Eventually what will happen is that your authoring tool will access repositories for you, Downes says. And on the other end, the authoring tool you use to create content will also create the metadata to easily share that content with others.

And what about other technologies? Could RSS be integrated with other new tools, such as the ones described in “We Learning”, parts I and II? Consider

• a social networking tool that sends you a feed informing you of the new people who just joined the network
• an expert management system that uses feeds to tell you when a new expert is added to the system in your area of interest, or when an expert has created a new document you might be interested in
• collaborative workspaces that use feeds to bring in information people in the group need to complete a project
• a problem-based RSS feed integrated with a social networking or expert management tool in which you could subscribe to a problem, for example “reluctant learners,” and then receive updates whenever someone writes on that topic.

Communications and technology expert Luigi Canali De Rossi, known as Robin Good, sums up the potential of RSS: “The creation of dedicated information channels, originated by independent publishers and not by vested commercial interests or mainstream media conglomerates, may create the opportunity for a true renaissance of culture, learning, and to a multiplication of our abilities to manage large amounts of rapidly changing information.”