IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (IMS) is developing and promoting open specifications for facilitating online distributed learning activities such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems.

IMS has two key goals: (1) Defining the technical specifications for interoperability of applications and services in distributed learning, and (2) supporting the incorporation of the IMS specifications into products and services worldwide. IMS endeavors to promote the widespread adoption of specifications that will allow distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors to interoperate.

Advanced Distributed Learning is an initiative sponsored by the United States Department of Defense designed to accelerate large-scale development of dynamic and cost-effective learning software. This project hopes to stimulate an efficient market for such products in order to meet the education and training needs of industry, academia, and government. It will do this through the development of a common technical framework for computer and net-based learning that will foster the creation of reusable learning content as "instructional objects."

An important element of the ADL mission is to improve educational application development, by liberating learning content objects from local implementations. ADL's work on the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) incorporates many emerging industry standards into one content model. It is intended to provide the technical means for content objects to be easily shared across multiple learning delivery environments.

OpenCourseWare (OCW) is an expansive MIT initiative to make MIT course materials freely available on the Web to any user anywhere in the world. This venture will continue the tradition at MIT and in American higher education of open dissemination of educational materials, philosophy, and modes of thought. OCW hopes to sponsor fundamental changes in the way colleges and universities engage the Web as a vehicle for education. Offered material would include lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, assignments, and technical content for each course.

OCW will not be a substitute for an MIT education, whose cornerstone is the fundamental interaction between faculty and students in the classroom. OCW is not a distance learning initiative, but it will require a sophisticated content management system, which highlights a strong convergence between the OCW project and O.K.I..