Ken, Let me take your two main questions (standards for learning design, and reasons for slow US adoption) in separate posts. In terms of open standards, the IMS Learning Design specification is the main reference point for this area. There is quite a history to this specification which I won't go into here, but for a brief discussion of issues from a LAMS perspective, see this article http://lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/lamsresearchdevelopment/forums/attach/goto-attachment?object_id=211547&attachment_id=211549
Suffice to say that open standards for Learning Design are a very important goal, and the ability to take a Learning Design created on one system and play it (with fidelity) on another is something worth striving for.
Unfortunately, the concept of Learning Design, as well as its implementation in the IMS LD specification, is quite complex, and I believe we are only at the beginning of many years of innovation and development. As a result, any Learning Design specification will need to evolve with new ideas and feedback from practice.
One of the areas that we have worked hard on in LAMS is how individual activity tools plug into a Learning Design system (ie, the core workflow engine of the run-time part of a Learning Design system) in such a way that it creates a well integrated and easy to use Learning Design application. This integration is described in the LAMS “Tools Contract” - for a technical discussion of this, see http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Tool+Contract
In essence, each activity tool (eg, Forum, Chat, Quiz, etc) needs to present four interfaces that follow certain behavioural conventions: Author, Monitor, Learner and Admin. These interfaces describe how an activity tool plugs into the main system, including authentication and roles (Admin), what interface it provides for authoring/configuration of itself (Authoring); the actual activity tool accessed by learners at the relevant step within a Learning Design when it is run (Learner); and how a teacher who is overseeing a running activity can view student tasks and intervene if required (Monitor).
So in addition to an ideal Learning Design standard that describes the structure and flow of activities (IMS LD is a first step in this direction), we also see an important role for a description of how activity tools run within a run-time system. These tool descriptions are a mixture of data element (eg, the thread for this forum discussion is “XXX”) and behavioural elements (eg, this forum tool should restrict students to posting a maximum of two responses to this forum, of no more than 1000 characters each, and students cannot start new threads). So in an ideal Learning Design standard, we'll need to come up with an agreed set of core data and behaviour elements for each type of activity tool, so that when I move my description of how to instantiate a forum from one system to a second system, the second system can recreate a functionally equivalent forum experience (regardless of the fact that it has its own different forum tool).
This kind of “rich” tools interoperability will be very demanding to get right, and will probably take quite awhile. Those working in the standards world will need to agree on core and optional features for each main type of activity tool, so as to provide a reasonable chance at interoperability as Learning Designs move between systems (eg, should a non-LAMS forum tool have the behavioural constraints described above? Would a text message to students telling them to do these things, without enforcing them in software, be sufficient for interoperability?).
As it happens, it was Tools Interoperability that ended my close involvement with the IMS specification development group. I had been closely involved with IMS for several years, and was excited when IMS decided to work on Tools Interoperability, as I felt this was key not just for Learning Design, but Learning Platforms in general. Unfortunately, it was made clear to me at the time that the Learning Design issues I was raising were not considered important at that time, so after failing to have this perspective included, I took time out from IMS, and haven't yet returned.
There is some new work that has recently started on Version 2 of IMS Tools Interoperability, and I've spoken to a number of those working on this about the importance of including a Learning Design perspective, but my sense so far is that Learning Design issues are not high on the list of priorities for those leading this work. It may come as a surprise to those outside the standards world, but despite IMS releasing the Learning Design specification, the concepts of Learning Design are not well understood among most IMS participants, and it was an unpleasant surprise to discover that among the many product areas designated for potential awards at the 2007 IMS Learning Impact Conference (including many that are not the basis of IMS specifications) - Learning Design was not mentioned (see http://www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact/).
Apart from Learning Design issues for Tools Interoperability, I think there are other ideas in the LAMS Tools Contract which are worth considering for any tool, not just a Learning Design-enabled tool. For example, LAMS V2 has a new a new feature called “export portfolio” - this feature allows a student to export a static HTML record of every activity they have been involved in within a running sequence. This allows students to keep their own “offline” record of their learning, which can then be stored in an e-portfolio (hence the name) or other location. We've found this feature to be very popular with students who want to keep an archival copy of their learning independent of their access to a particular Learning Platform. So while this feature is not specific to Learning Design, we see it as a useful new feature to be considered as part of a rich Tools Interoperability specification.
So in summary, open standards for Learning Design are very important, but challenging to get right, at both the “flow” and “tools” level. I hope the LAMS Tools Contract provides some useful new ways of thinking about these ideas for future standards development, although I'm sorry to say that I'm quite concerned about the state of standards development in this area. It is always hard to get the balance right between innovation and consensus in standards development, but in this case, I feel that Learning Design issues in Tools Interoperability have mostly been ignored to date.
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