e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: IMS

  • Lots of News in the IMS Standards World

    Update: Scott Wilson rightly pointed out to me that the IMS produces specifications, not standards.

    This week was the annual IMS Learning Impact conference, and it brought with it a slew of announcements about progress on education-specific technical standards:

    • Learning Information Services v2.0 Public Draft Released: Well, this took waaay longer than expected, but the full draft is now ready for public review. I have written about this standard a few times before. Basically, it fixes many of the current problems with SIS/LMS integration and provides a more general means of provisioning class roster information into any application that needs it. LIS makes it easier for schools to move to support multiple LMSs, move to a different LMS, or make it easier for faculty and students to use non-LMS collaboration tools for classes. Expect more announcements about increased adoption of the standard in the coming months.
    • Basic Learning Tool Interoperability Finalized: This is a standard for proxying learning tools into your LMS/portal/PLE/whatever-unified-learning-environment-you-please. Think of Basic LTI as a lightweight, cross-platform answer to Blackboard Building Blocks/WebCT PowerLinks/Moodle Modules/whatever. Full LTI, which supports more complex use cases at the cost of a more complex implementation, is in the works.
    • Access For All 2.0 Finalized: AFA is an accessibility standard that has actually been around since 2003. However, it has since been submitted and adopted as an ISO standard and was modified significantly in the process. AFA 2.0 harmonizes the IMS standard with the ISO version of the standard.
    • Common Cartridge Adopted by Textbook Publishers to Support Tennessee Board of Regents: This is pretty big news. Standards generally don’t get traction unless customers demand that they be supported by their vendors. In this case, the Tennessee Board of Regents told the various textbook publishers that they expected course content for the high-enrollment general education requirements courses to be published in Common Cartridge format. Common Cartridge, if widely adopted, means the end of platform-specific course cartridges. It also potentially means that faculty migrating their courses from one system to another, either because they change schools or because their schools are changing LMSs, will have a much easier time of it. This latter bit will only happen if and when LMS platforms support Common Cartridge export, so be sure yo demand this from your vendor or your open source community.

  • Blackboard's Progress Toward Standards Support

    Coming out of this week’s IMS meeting, Ray Henderson has a good post up describing the progress Blackboard was able to demonstrate toward support of the IMS Common Cartridge (CC) and Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLTI) standards. Sometimes it’s hard to tell from a distance how committed a company is to implementing a standard—particularly one that’s still under development. Something to look for is regular public demonstrations of progress within the context of the standards body. The work Blackboard unveiled this week bodes well. The CC demo (import only at this point) was developed by Blackboard itself, while the BLTI demo was implemented as a building block by Steven Vickers at the University of Edinburgh (and released under the GPL open source license). Ray promises an update on the progress at the BbWorld conference in July.

    Good stuff.

  • Curtiss Barnes on Learning Information Services

    Curtiss Barnes is Vice President of Industry Product Strategy for Education and Research at Oracle, and he’s also an all around smart guy. In his latest blog post, he has some more details on recent progress with LIS.

    It’s well worth your time.

  • IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union

    Regular e-Literate readers know that I am a big booster of the IMS Learning Information Services specification. (For an overview of the basics of the specification, see my posts here, here, and here.) There has been a lot of news recently about adoption, and I thought it would be worthwhile to pull together a unified post of who is doing what. I’m going to divide vendors and projects into a few different categories based on their released code, public commitments, etc.

    (more…)

  • Pearson Announces Support for IMS Learning Information Services

    Pearson just announced that they will be supporting the IMS LIS standard (and with Oracle’s SAIP implementation of it) across a number of their products. First, they’ll support it in MyLabs, which are subject-focused learning environments (e.g., MyChemLab, MyMathLab, etc.)—sort of a fusion between an online textbook and a lightweight LMS. This kind of provisioning cuts out the middle man of the full LMS. (Up until now, the course roster information would typically be provisioned to the LMS, and the LMS would then provision it to MyLabs.)

    Pearson will also be supporting LIS integration for their newly announced LearningStudio product, which is a fusion of their eCollege and Fronter acquisitions. I haven’t seen LearningStudio yet, but I have seen Fronter, and I was seriously impressed. It may just be the most powerful and flexible LMS on the market today. It has been focused on the K12 (European) market up until now, but I saw nothing that would prevent it from working well in higher education as well.

  • Desire2Learn Delivers IMS Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI) Support

    In other IMS news, Desire2Learn has announced that they are the first LMS provider to support BLTI, a specification designed to support plugging third-party tools into an LMS. According to the press release, here’s what’s included:

    • Management interfaces to define integrations to external learning tools (Tool Providers) and to create links
    • New Quicklink type to allow links to Tool Providers to be easily incorporated throughout Desire2Learn courses
    • Links to external learning tools that can send user, organization, and course context information for a personalized experience in the tool; single-sign-on to learning tools is supported through an oAuth framework using a key/secret shared between the external learning tool and the configured link in Learning Environment
    • Management tools to configure mapping from Desire2Learn roles to IMS roles, and from Desire2Learn org unit types to IMS context types

    A couple of other platforms are following D2L on this road.

    This is just the work that’s visible to the public. As is often the case with these things, (a) more work is going on behind the scenes, but (b) you should demand to see working code and a commitment to a supported release within a defined time frame before taking any statements of support by a vendor or project too seriously.

    Kudos to Desire2Learn for taking the lead here.

  • Jenzibar Planning to Support IMS Learning Information Services Standard

    I mentioned here recently that SunGard has committed to supporting IMS Learning Information Services in their next release, making them the second major SIS provider to do so. (Oracle, my employer, has supported it in Peoplesoft Campus Solutions for about a year now.) There’s a press release out from the IMS confirming this now, and also bringing the exciting news that Jenzabar “has also joined SunGard Higher Education and Oracle to support the LIS standard.” Also according to the press release, “Support from these three organizations means that LIS will be supported by suppliers that collectively comprise about two-thirds of the vendor-based, higher education student systems market in North America.”

    Now, the Jenzabar announcement is news to me. I’m not sure if they’ve attended any working group meetings yet, and I’m also not sure if they’ve made a commitment to supporting LIS in a particular release yet. Still, this is another really solid step forward for the standard.

    There are more LIS announcements to come, too.