e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: IMS

  • Moodlerooms Doing Great Standards-Based Integration Work

    I meant to get this up a while ago. Moodlerooms has been on a tear lately. First, they submitted a patch to Moodle to enhance integration with external systems for enrollment purposes. This isn’t standards-based integration in itself, but I’m told it aids with integration of things like LDAP and LIS. Next, they integrated Moodle with Google Apps using the SAML 2.0 and Oauth standards, so they can provision users to Google Apps from their Moodle accounts and then have them work with, for example, a Google doc within the Moodle environment without having to log in twice.

    And finally, in a move that is near and dear to my heart, they announced integration with Oracle’s SAIP via the IMS LIS standard. Moodlerooms’ Moodle is now the first LIS consumer to support real-time integration. 

    Yay standards! Yay Moodlerooms!

  • CSU Picks Moodle and ANGEL

    Cal State University, with its 23 campuses and 250,000 students, has signed contracts with Moodlerooms and ANGEL, according to Campus Technology. (I’ve known this was in the works for some time now, but I guess it just went official.) These are statewide pricing contracts; individual campuses still get to choose whatever system they choose. Still, it’s a big deal for both vendors, as well as for the Moodle community. Word on the street is that both Moodle and ANGEL got particularly high marks because of their strong accessibility; California has strict accessibility laws and regulations.

    I have been blogging a fair bit about the IMS LIS standard. I want to point out that LIS makes this sort of adoption more meaningful. Generally speaking, individual campuses tend to be reluctant to move off of whatever they have because of high migration costs. With LIS, one substantial portion of that migration cost—namely, integration—is very substantially reduced. It also becomes much more economically feasible for campuses to run more than one of these systems at the same time. Interoperability standards may not be thrilling from a pedagogical perspective, but if they lower the barriers for IT staff to provide alternatives to faculty and students then they have a strong impact on teaching and learning at the end of the day.

  • IMS Learning Information Services: Enabling Innovation

    In my previous posts on this topic, I outlined the mundate yet important core use cases that LIS is intended to address. Now I’d like to start looking at some of the sexier possibilities that the spec enables. In recent guest posts, Inigral‘s Michael Staton wrote about the Schools on Facebook application and also let the cat out of the bag that Schools works with Oracle’s LIS implementation, called SAIP. (I couldn’t respond publicly at the time because Oracle’s product hadn’t been officially released yet.) The details of what Inigral has done here are worth exploring, both because they demonstrate how LIS can be used to do new and exciting things and because they provide some clarity about how to think about (and to not think about) social software and PLEs.

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  • IMS Learning Information Services: What a Solution Looks Like

    In an earlier post, I outlined the motivating pain that brought the working group members to the table. In this post, I’m going to list out the highlights of the solution we came up with to address that pain. Again, this post is focused mainly on the important but unsexy problems of SIS/LMS integration that IMS LIS was intended to address. I’ll get to some of the sexier implications in a future post.

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  • IMS Learning Information Services: The Motivating Pain

    Today Oracle announced the release of the Student Administration Integration Pack, or SAIP. It’s the first product that I have worked on as an Oracle employee, and I’m proud of it for a number of reasons. It’s not a particularly glamorous piece of software, but I think it’s going to be important. This is my first post in a planned series about it.

    I’m going to start the series with a few posts about the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification that the SAIP implements. Because, really, the specification is at the heart of the product. Now, let me get one thing out of the way, because some of you are going to complain ask. A draft of the LIS specification has just left the working group and is currently available to IMS members only. It will be made available to non-IMS members by December, after which there will be a better part of a year when it will be open to public comment and further revision from the working group before it is finalized. I know that this schedule makes some of you unhappy. I have complained about it myself. I’m going to tell you as much as I can now and let you know the moment that more information becomes available to the general public.

    Anyway….

    Today’s post will focus on describing the main pains schools have been experiencing that motivated the creation of the specification in the first place. In later posts, I’ll talk about how the LIS attempts to relieve those pains (again, not glamorous but still important), and then I’ll write a little bit about some of the moderately sexier possibilities that LIS will also enable.
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  • Connecting Blackboard to Sakai and Moodle

    I didn’t intend to post about this, but people keep asking me what I think, so I guess I need to get something up. For starters, you should read Michael Korcuska’s post on the subject. I agree with everything he says. Beyond that, here’s what I think:

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  • Secret Society Maybe Not So Secret

    Since I complained recently about the IMS needing to open up more, it’s only fair that I should give credit when they actually do it. Chuck Severence, who now works part-time for the IMS, has a public test site up for people who want to test against a subset of the forthcoming Learning Tool Interoperability specification. Now, the full specification drafts are still non-public (to the extent that they even exist–LTI is still under active development) but, to be honest, hardly anybody reads the full spec anyway. What Chuck has done is much more useful because he’s providing sufficient documentation and tools for people to actually start building and testing LTI-compliant tools without a lot of extraneous gobbledygook. All it needs now is a feedback forum, and the IMS will suddenly have a very open and results-oriented (though perhaps not yet comprehensive) process for non-IMS members to provide feedback on specs in development.

    Brilliant work. Really, a very big step forward.

    On a side note, Chuck mentions the use of REST in the documentation. Thus far, the IMS has been pretty SOAP-heavy in its approach to web services. If the LTI group is indeed making judicious use of REST (which would make particular sense given the nature of what they’re trying to do) then that also is a Very Good Thing.