The IMS project released its first set of meta-data specifications for comment in early May 1998. If content is reusable, it should cause the price of content delivery to fall dramatically. Second, if content is reusable, it may be distributed to anyone around the world over the Internet. So, we expect the IMS project will cause a dramatic drop in price and significant increase in the accessibility of educational content. Smart money is being bet on the Goliaths.
Small companies are likely to be acquired in the rush to market dominance.
However this is not necessarily bad news for smaller companies. Such optimism by small and large companies points to boom times ahead for online learning. Nearly half of the 3,800 American institutions of higher education are providing some variety of distance education. Software vendors are jockeying to build enterprise education applications that manage a virtual campus and manage the learning process and integrate with legacy administrative systems.