Enterprise Course Catalog
A capability designed to federate course catalogs across the DoD by automatically pulling metadata from local sources, making course listings available from a single portal.
The Challenge
Existing course catalogs lack interoperability and are not architected to easily transfer data between systems, minimizing the sharing of catalog data across the DoD. Today, some customized, point-to-point are used to transfer data between systems, but more often, course listings are only available from within each, individual system. Further, current course catalogs use antiquated, nonstandard metadata to describes courses, and that metadata is typically sparse and idiosyncratic. Finally, local catalogs are often tied to proprietary systems. As a result, minimal sharing of catalog data across the DoD makes it more difficult to find training and education opportunities, limits the ability to identify course duplicates, and prevents effective automation of enterprise learning systems.
The Solution
An Enterprise Course Catalog (ECC) that can pull information from the myriad of decentralized local catalog listings managed by DoD Components and aggregate the listings into an enterprise capability. The data from those local data sources are collected, harmonized, and made accessible via a single web-based portal, accessible by content owners, administrators, learners, and instructors via a global search tool.
About the Project
In July 2018, the DoD Chief Management Officer and the Reform Management Group directed DoD to implement the (now called) Enterprise Digital Learning Modernization (EDLM) reform. One of its lines of effort is to build the ECC. The ADL Initiative is spearheading the R&D for the ECC.
The ECC provides a global search capability that pulls information from the myriad of decentralized local catalog listings and aggregates them into a single, enterprise-wide catalog. The ECC is not simply another course catalog, though. Instead, it provides an interface for existing catalogs, federating across them. It will also provide automatic metadata generation, beyond what is currently available within each local system. This metadata will help to align available learning activities with one another as well as connect them to specific careers, competencies, and credentials.
Course catalog systems and their respective content will continue to be owned and managed by their current system owners. However, their content will become discoverable across all of DoD via a single web-based portal, usable by content owners, administrators, learners, and instructors.