EPUB for Education (EDUPUB) proposal

All,

For discussion on Tuesday’s business group call:

After discussions among the steering committee, and with the community group chairs, and with IMS Global board members and staff, I would like to make this proposal for a path forward for the EPUB for Education (EDUPUB) specification:

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

Consolidate work around the EPUB 3.1 specification:
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.  This includes the ‘Content Structure’ details in section 4 (in essence, the content structure details and associated metadata defined in Accessibility 1.0 are all that will be made normative).

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.  Where it makes sense, these can be rolled into a 3.1.x release. Special care should be drawn to the deprecation of epub type and the move to role in a 3.1.x release.

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 any needed best practices and certification procedures.  We should allow them to have the freedom to use the EDUPUB name for that set of specifications, if they so desire.



-Rick