ATP Public Meeting Announcement
Learning Technologies
December 15, 1997
Green Auditorium, Administration Building
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD

NIST's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) provides competitive, cost-shared awards for industry to develop high-risk, enabling technologies with broad-based economic benefit. ATP seeks to help industry fill the gap between basic research and product development, and to invest in technology that would not be developed in a competitive time frame without government cost-sharing. Along with general competitions that are open to proposals from all technical areas, ATP is also funding a series of "focused programs" with specific business and technical goals.

The proposed Learning Technologies (LT) focused program is currently designed to target the instructional software industry. The program aims to facilitate migration of content producers, learners (both workers and students) and training as well as educational institutions to the Internet and other distributed environments. Support provided through this program is intended to encourage development and implementation of a new generation of interoperable, multimedia content and service components that are widely available on intranets, extranets, and the Internet.

The proposed scope of this program has been developed from a variety of industrial inputs including industry roadmaps, white papers submitted to ATP, and a number of projects from this technical area funded through ATP's other competitions. Based on this input, it is anticipated that the scope of the proposed program will be limited to (a) authoring and other content-production tools which can dramatically reduce the cost and time to market for educational content (b) knowledge management and multi-sensory interface technology - such as intelligent agents, navigation tools, collaborative systems and embedding devices - that can improve the delivery of instructional opportunities when needed and where needed; and (c) large-scale modular components and middleware which can ensure a high quality of service in networked learning environments, services which support a wide variety of interactions and transactions for training and education. Key technical barriers to be addressed by research under this program include but are not limited to (a) interoperability, scalability and extensibility of educational components and middleware; (b) tool complexity and/or domain expert (nonprogrammer) skill limitations; and (c) absence and/or under performance of services to support interactive education and training in distributed environments. Specifically excluded from the scope are stand-alone and hard-to-maintain systems; projects focused exclusively on content or simple components; tools incompatible with distributed access and a strategy of customization; infrastructure incompatible with collaborative applications; tools and infrastructure limited to high-end or single purposes; tools and infrastructure that fail to consider the needs and skill levels of end-users - especially workers or learners, trainers or educators, and domain experts or nonprogrammers; projects that fail to demonstrate measurable gains in either cost, time-to-market, usability, or manageability.

The purpose of this workshop is to review the program scope, to provide detailed planning, to make recommendations which will contribute to the timely initiation of this program, and to confirm the program's linkage to the needs of industry. Representatives from end-user groups, companies or groups of companies, technical and trade associations, academic institutions, non-profit research institutions, and government laboratories who are developers of educational software and systems are invited to critique the program plan (see ATP website under URL: http://www.atp.nist.gov/atp/97wp-lt.htm). Comments may be most useful if presented as brief presentations (5 minutes, 3 or 4 slides) concerning the proposed plan. Comments should specifically relate to the criteria by which ATP focused programs are selected: (a) good technical ideas; (b) potential US economic benefit; (c) strong industry commitment; and (d) opportunity for ATP support to make a difference. This meeting is not intended to identify or promote specific technical ideas or proposals that could be submitted to ATP programs.

Agenda

Location

The workshop will be held at NIST (Gaithersburg, Maryland) in the Green Auditorium of the Administration Building.

Registration

No registration fee will be charged. Participants may purchase food and beverages in the NIST cafeteria.

General Information Contact

Workshop Registration