An excerpt from Sakai’s press release regarding a demonstration of the IMS Tool Interoperability (TI) standard:
The demonstration included four LMS systems including BlackBoard, WebCT, Sakai, and Moodle. The demonstration included three applications: Concept Tutor, Samigo(Sakai), and QuestionMark. All LMS/Application combinations worked and were demonstrated at the meeting which validates the interoperability of the IMS TI specification.
The demonstration was the culmination of nine months of significant co-design and engineering between all of the participants.
Now that the interoperability demonstration is complete, the standard is expected to be published Fall 2005. As long as the standard is finalized in time, we expect that this feature will be present in the Sakai 2.1 release in the Fall 2005.
So tit for tat; now Sakai and Moodle can integrate proprietary pieces like QuestionMark as easily as WebCT and Blackboard can integrate FOSS pieces like Samigo. Note that it doesn’t matter whether your LMS is written in, say, PHP (like Moodle) or Java (like Sakai and WebCT). That’s part of the magic of web services.
In the short term, the P.R. mileage that the proprietary vendors get out of announcing integration with a given specialized tool vendor gets drastically reduced if not eliminated. Anything that complies with TI will run on at least two FOSS platforms as well.
In the long run, this is a first step toward the disintegration of the LMS and the creation of the LMOS. Why can’t every single tool in Moodle, Sakai, Blackboard, or WebCT interoperate this way? Why do I have to pick one package for 90% of my functionality and only be able to make choices about the last 10%?
Michael,
I love the idea of picking the best tools from each system and hooking them together. Overall it sounds like an amazing goal.
I think a realistic limitation of all this, at this time, is that you’d need to support 2, or 3 or more “platforms” and that is going to cost a lot. Now is the cost worth it? That’s a good question. It might be if the alternative is a greatly dimished capability, for example, if the message board in one system is way behind, or just doesn’t support the methods of learning that you need.
I don’t want to diminish the potential, I think yo u are on the right track, I guess the road will just be bumpy.
That’s only true to a degree, Dave. In the short-run, the platforms don’t all have to be supported by the same people. If they are web services, they don’t even have to live on the same server. (I don’t know if this applies to TI specifically, since I haven’t seen the spec, but it’s language-independent nature would lead me to suspect that it does.)
In the long-run, at least some of these tools will break free from their platforms (as Samigo has from Sakai). You won’t have to support the platform; just the individual tool.
The Sakai 2.0 Gradebook has also been designed to be loosely coupled to the framework. (And to support the Back button, although it’s definitely odd application out at this point.)
It’s a pitty that IMS TI left aside a lot of aspects that would be great to have include in it.
For instance, the integration doesn’t include any aspect of authoring. So you would have to have created the assessment before hand in Samigo -rather than potentially created on the fly or from your LMS if needed.
In addition, it looks to me from my conversations with the Sakai fellows at Alt-i-lab that there’s little you can do to monitor the state of the integrated tool that you have called from your LMS. There’s really a way for the user to click on the “Finish” button on the assessment and go back to your LMS.
So, for certain tool that require not to have any tracking of state, then IMS TI might be useful. However, for some others (LAMS included) this doesn’t quite help.
It would have been great if we could have used IMS TI to basically have tools that can be run in any LMS, since once you do your tool proxy one, you are ready to go. But I guess for a bunch of tools, we would have to still work on specialized integration if we want richer ways of integrations.
Ernie
I’ts now been two years since this post first was published.
Has ther been any developmet?
Is there any tools publicly available except for the ConseptTutor?
Can I now buy an xml config file witch give me access to a tool in a LMS that supports the IMS tools interoperability guidelines?