I’ll be giving a talk for UMassOnline on the morning of Thursday, August 5th in Shrewsbury, MA. The title of the talk is “W(h)ither the LMS?” You can read my guest post on the UMassOnline blog here and register for the event here.
Author: Michael Feldstein
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New LMS Entrant: NIXTY
You may have already heard a bit about NIXTY, since they have managed to make a significant media splash in the last few weeks. There have been a number of interesting analyses, both pro and con. I’d like to highlight a few aspects that haven’t gotten much coverage.
For starters, here’s a screencast that NIXTY CEO Glen Moriarty was kind enough to make for me:
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How To Judge Your Vendor’s Support for a Standard
I wasn’t planning on writing this post, but I’ve become aware of several recent conversations that have led me to the conclusion that it would be useful to get this out.
For people who adopt software, trying to judge the value of so-called “standards support” in a product can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standards implementations often fail to live up to their promises and, worse, it can be very hard to tell in advance of installing and running the software whether or not the “standards support” it supposedly provides is actually going to meet your needs. There are several reasons for this. First, creating a standard is hard. You have to think of all the different ways people might want to use the technology in all kinds of different environments, and then find some overlay that can meet all of those needs while still being able to work with existing software packages that are very different from each other. For example, Peoplesoft Campus Solutions and SunGard Banner are both SISs, but their architectures and data models are substantially different from each other. The same is true among the various LMSs. If you have a standard that is supposed to represent data from any SIS to any LMS (like, for example, the IMS Learning Information Services standard does), then you have to come up with a representation of that data that maps to the different data models and works with the different architectures. This is always hard, and it’s harder on some software developers than on others. For example, if your system doesn’t already have some pretty robust generic ways to interact with web services, then it will be more work for you to support a standard that is built on web services.
Further complicating the picture is that, while it is almost always in vendors’ interest to say that they support a standard, it often isn’t in their interest to do the hard work of actually supporting the standard, especially in the short term. Standards tend to reduce the total amount of money that customers spend on integration, which generally means that somebody is going to make less money. This hits companies that depend on service revenues harder than it hits companies that mostly sell product because at least with the product you can build the cost of the standards implementation into your license fees. But the truth of the matter is that, most of the time, everybody makes less money after a standard has been implemented, at least in the long run. This is because a standard, by definition, commodifies the function it is standardizing. A capability cannot be a differentiator if everybody does it. Therefore, while you might be able to continue to charge for the capability, particularly if you implement it very well and early, customers will, over time, increasingly expect it to be an affordable part of the package rather than a major expense (including the ongoing expense of maintenance that comes with a consulting-based custom integration).
The net result is a situation where it is both technically easy and financially convenient for the outcome of standards implementation to be nothing more than one more meaningless bullet point that vendors can add to their glossy product brochures. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can hold your vendors accountable for delivering the actual value that the standards promise, if you know the right questions to ask.
For starters, learn what it means for software to “comply” with the particular standard. Using a standard and complying with it are not the same, and there can be nuances. For example, the Learning Information Services (LIS) standard, like many of the newer IMS standards, has something called an application profile (also sometimes referred to as a conformance profile), which is essentially the subset of the total specification that developers must implement in order to assure interoperability. At the moment, LIS has only one application profile. So for LIS, you want to ask your vendor if they support or intend to support all mandatory elements of that application profile. If they don’t, then they don’t really support the standard and they can’t guarantee interoperability. Oracle’s implementation of LIS (which is called SAIP) supports all mandatory elements. Beyond that, there are optional elements. Ask them which ones they are supporting and which ones they aren’t. You may even want them to give you a list. These elements provide additional functionality beyond the bare minimum, some of which may be very important to your institution. Details matter. SAIP supports many, but not all, optional elements of the LIS application profile.Second, find out if the vendor has added extensions to the standard that are required for integration. Extension isn’t always a bad thing, which is why many standards explicitly provide extension mechanisms. However, extensions that break the minimal interoperability that the standard promises are always a bad thing. Oracle has not extended LIS in SAIP and has committed to supporting the finalized version of the plain vanilla LIS application profile with no extensions required to achieve interoperability shortly after that finalized version comes out.
Third, find out if there are any official conformance tests and, if so, whether the software you’re evaluating has passed them. LIS doesn’t have an official conformance test yet, although one is planned. Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLT), another IMS standard, does have a conformance test. If a software package supposedly BLTI but hasn’t passed the test, that would be a red flag.
Finally, find out of the software has been tested against multiple implementations. As much as a standard can lower the barriers for interoperability, there is no better test either for the standard itself or for its implementation than seeing whether integration works as advertised with different products. If a supposedly standards-compliant product has only been tested to integrate with one other product, then you can’t have confidence that it has achieved the true interoperability that the standard promises. Oracle has completed LIS integration testing with Sakai, Moodle, and Schools on Facebook, is testing integration with another product now, and has testing plans with more in the near future.
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Interview With Desire2Learn CEO John Baker
As promised, here’s the interview:
I have a couple of take-aways from both the interview and the conference. First of all, I was astonished at how much D2L is growing. Based on what I saw at the Sakai conference, what the market surveys have been saying, and what I know from talking to people, it was already clear to me going in that there’s a big shift happening in the LMS market. I expected to see D2L benefiting from that. But I wasn’t prepared to see the number of new clients they’re on-boarding. I’m trying to get a list to illustrate the size of the growth. In his keynote, John had three slides’ worth of new logos. These aren’t expanded client relationships, which is the kind of thing that Blackboard tends to highlight these days. These are new clients.
Second, the economic downturn is affecting the market, but the effects are somewhat unpredictable. John’s story about PASSHE, a system with fourteen different universities, migrating to D2L in a couple of months, is remarkable. There’s only one thing that can drive a fractious group of state colleges to act that quickly in unison: a budget crisis.
And finally, I do see a vision for the future of the LMS emerging from D2L’s development work (although it’s hard to convey a clear sense of it in the interview format). It’s a vision that is significantly different in some ways from Sakai’s, Moodle’s, or Instructure’s. My sense is that it’s also different than Blackboard’s, but I’m not familiar enough with the details of Blackboard 9.1 and their roadmap to say so with a great deal of confidence. Desire2Learn is headed straight into the thicket of some thorny cultural change management problems at the university. Adopting and sharing learning objectives, sharing learning content, taking a systemic approach to ePorfolios, discovering metrics in student activity and performance data—each of these efforts individually is hard to sell in a university culture and results in failure more often than success. D2L appears to be betting that the problems are actually easier to solve together than separately because you can get synergies from integrating the technologies behind them. It’s not clear to me whether they’ve fully articulated their approach that way, even to themselves, but it is, in fact, what they appear to be trying to do.
I have more to say about what I learned about the conference, including about the company’s announcements about their mobile plans and how they stack up against the other market entrants, but I also have a Jim Farmer post, a post about another new LMS entrant called NIXTY, and probably the most important Sakai conference post to get up as well. And next week I’ll be at Campus Technology all week, which both limits the amount of blogging time I have and will undoubtedly provide fodder for new posts.
I’ll crank it out as fast as I can.
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On Providing a Platform For Interesting People to be Heard
I’m going to be posting a video interview of Desire2Learn CEO John Baker, probably in the next 24 hours. It seems likely that I’ll be doing more interviews in the future. I’m discovering that I have a particular philosophy about how to do the interviews, which is in line with my attitudes toward guest posts and technology demo posts. I’m very lucky to have e-Literate as a platform to get information out to a pretty large audience. There are lots of people out there who are very smart and have very interesting things to say that deserve to be heard. So part of what I try to do here is to help them reach a broader audience.
Here’s how I approach that goal:
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The LIS Standard Moves Forward
I’m at the Desire2Learn conference this week and will have a couple of posts up soon about the astonishing progress the company is making on a number of fronts. But I’m writing this post in response to some news that’s coming out of BbWorld. I am delighted (though a little surprised) to hear that Blackboard has just committed to releasing support for the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) standard and will be testing interoperability with SunGard. I haven’t heard any details yet, although based on their announcements about supporting two other standards (BLTI and Common Cartridge) by the end of 2010, I’m guessing that they will get their LIS integration out some time in 2011.
With Blackboard joining the crowd, all the LMSs that have major market share in the U.S. now either have LIS support available today or have publicly committed to having it in the near future:
- Sakai supports it in all distributions.
- Moodle has it for Moodlerooms customers (although I would still like to see it available for other Moodle distributions).
- Desire2Learn has committed to supporting it soon. (In fact, one of the reasons that I’m at their conference right now is to talk about our progress in testing Peoplesoft/D2L LIS integration. It’s looking like D2L is going to have the most complete and sophisticated LMS-side implementation of LIS so far.)
- eCollege has publicly committed to getting LIS integration done as well.
By the time Blackboard finishes their implementation, we’ll have the first tier of LMS applications all standards-compliant and will be hopefully filling out the ecosystem with up-and-coming LMSs and some non-LMS systems that could benefit from the same type of integration.
Since this is my personal blog, I don’t feel compelled to write about my employer here. But I have to say that I am very proud of what Oracle has accomplished in this area and, equally importantly, how we accomplished it. When my colleagues realized four years ago (before I even joined the company) that we had an integration problem that was causing colleges a lot of pain and costing them time and money, they decided from the beginning to go the standards route. The IMS Enterprise Services standard was moribund at the time, so we really had to build a constituency for change almost from scratch. We invested an enormous amount of time not just building out our own product but also working through differences with partners, customers, and competitors alike in the standards development process. For four years, we worked on LIS every single week (with my colleague Linda Feng doing particularly heroic work chairing the working group, writing documentation, getting adopters to the test floor, and generally being the dynamo that drove the whole process). We built the very first LIS implementation anywhere and we put it out as supported software well over a year ago. When LMSs and other applications have needed to test their interoperability with the standard, we set up a test floor and made staff available to work with them. We actively recruited SunGard, our biggest competitor, to join the process. I am happy note the great milestone that, because of SunGard’s coming on board, Blackboard will be the first LIS consumer that didn’t have to come to our test floor as the only game in town. And of course, a rising tide lifts all boats. If Blackboard produces an LIS-compliant integration with SunGard, it should work with Peoplesoft Campus Solutions as well. That’s the whole point of the standard. Again, I don’t know the details of how Blackboard is doing things, but what we’re seeing with other integrations is largely an end to big consulting fees just to set up what should be a standard integration. Certainly on our side, it’s a simple setup that customers can usually either do themselves or do with a relatively modest amount of help from Oracle or from partners like Unicon.
So we’re coming into some good times for LIS. The major players are on board, with hopefully many more to come. I expect the specification to be finalized relatively soon, which will mean that everybody can be assured that there will be real plug-and-play interoperability. (We’ve been updating our implementation as the spec has evolved and have committed to be fully compliant with the final draft shortly after it has been issued.) And since our implementation is mature now, we’ve had a chance to bring out some really exciting refinements (like the ability to simultaneously integrate with multiple systems and send each only the data that it needs on the schedule that it needs), with some really advanced stuff made possible by the service-oriented architecture underlying LIS on the way.
Life is good.
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Sakai 3 Roadmap and Progress
Up until now, it would have been fair to call Sakai 3 a mature experiment. Two years of work have been invested, mostly by Cambridge, to test out some ideas about the design, architecture, and development ecosystem of next-generation virtual learning environments. We have learned a lot from it, but the level of commitment to turn it from an experiment into a product system has been somewhat vague.
That changed a couple of weeks ago at the Sakai conference in Denver. We now have a much clearer idea of when Sakai 3 might be deployable as a production system to meet different purposes.