e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LIS

  • 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.

  • 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.

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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: 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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