RE: Some implications of the EPUB for Education Profile issue

Thanks, Rick.

When we discuss this, we should keep in mind the implications for domains other than education. We need to think about who “controls” a profile of EPUB. In this case, I think IMS Global is obvious for the reasons you mention. Do we (the PBG or the CG) need to have any involvement at all in that, or given that EPUB is an open standard, is it okay for them to just take it and run with it, as it were?

The reason I raise that question is that obviously lots of other verticals might want to do the same thing. Do we want to have any involvement or oversight on that—or even some sort of stamp of approval that what has been done is not in conflict with EPUB—or is it better for us to be hands-off?

I would definitely like to see IMS be able to forge ahead with this because I think the EPUB for Education work is important and they are clearly the right organization to take it to the next level. I just want to be sure we are aware that we would be setting a bit of a precedent with how we handle that.

--Bill K

Bill Kasdorf

VP and Principal Consultant | Apex CoVantage

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From: Johnson, Rick [mailto:Rick.Johnson@ingramcontent.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2017 2:08 AM
To: PBG Steering Committee (Public)
Cc: Bill McCoy (W3C); Karen Myers; Ivan Herman
Subject: Re: Agenda items for 4/4 steering committee call

Regarding the EDUPUB conversation item in my proposed agenda, I would like to discuss the below (sharing via email to avoid issues with irc).

-Rick

EDUPUB/EPUB for Education Proposal
(referencing the current draft at http://www.idpf.org/epub/profiles/edu/spec/ )

All accessibility work, the ‘Education Document Models’ (section 3), Annotations (section 9), Navigation (section 7), and the inclusion of scriptable components (section 5) or distributable objects (section 10) are the purview of, and stated to align with the W3C work on EPUB and future iterations of EPUB.  In short, we tell people to use EPUB 3.1, and future versions for these items.  The work done for EDUPUB is deprecated in favor of EPUB 3.1 and future versions.

The ‘Content Structure’ details (section 4 and the related vocabulary), along with the ‘Publication Metadata’ (section 8 and the related vocabulary)) have value to be made normative for educational use, and should be given to the CG to finalize as a set of specifications for educational use of EPUB 3.1.  Attention should be given to harmonizing this work with other W3C investigations, such as is illustrated in the comment at https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/846#issuecomment-290399200


Dealing with (section 6) outcome results flowing back to a grade book, and integration with educational systems needing interoperability (such as LTI) are not the purview of a horizontally focused organization (like the W3C), and should be given over to a vertically focused organization (like IMS Global) to standardize best practices and certification procedures.  If they are interested (and I know that they are!) in having the freedom to use the EDUPUB name for that set of specifications, we would give them the ability to do so.