e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: LTI

  • Opening Up the LMS Walled Garden

    In yesterday’s post I described where I (and many others) see the LMS market heading in terms of interoperability.

    At the same time, the LMS does a very poor job at providing a lot of the learning technologies desired by faculty and students. There is no way that a monolithic LMS can keep up with the market – it cannot match functionality of open internet tools especially without adding feature bloat.

    I would add that part of the cause of the “false binary position” that D’Arcy points out is that much of the public commentary focuses on where the LMS has been rather than where it is going. There is a significant movement based on interoperability that is leading, perhaps painfully and slowly, to a world where the LMS can coexist with open educational tools, with even end users (faculty and students) eventually having the ability to select their tools that can share rosters and data with the institutional LMS.

    Coexistence and interoperability, however, should not imply merely having links from the LMS to external tools as is too often the case.

    The Walled Garden

    The LMS (which George Station rightly points out was really called the Course Management System in the early years) started out as a walled garden with basic functionality of syllabus sharing, announcements, gradebook, email, and a few other tools.

    walledgarden

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  • LMS and Open: The false binary is based on past, not future markets

    D’Arcy Norman has an excellent blog post up titled “On the false binary of LMS vs. Open” that captures a false framing issue.

    We’re pushed into a false binary position – either you’re on the side of the evil LMS, working to destroy all that is beautiful and good, or you’re on the side of openness, love, and awesomeness. Choose. There is no possible way to teach (or learn) effectively in an LMS! It is EVIL and must be rooted out before it sinks its rotting tendrils into the unsuspecting students who are completely and utterly defenseless against its unnatural power!

    While D’Arcy is a proponent of open tools, he rightly calls out the need to understand institutional responsibilities.

    But. We can’t just abdicate the responsibility of the institution to provide the facilities that are needed to support the activities of the instructors and students. That doesn’t mean just “hey – there’s the internet. go to it.” It means providing ways for students to register in courses. For their enrolment to be automatically processed to provision access to resources (physical classrooms, online environments, libraries, etc…). For students’ grades and records to be automatically pushed back into the Registrar’s database so they can get credit for completing the course. For integration with library systems, to grant acccess to online reserve reading materials and other resources needed as part of the course.

    This is an important point, in that the institutional LMS is important and will not, and should not, go away anytime soon. I have pointed out recently that the LMS is one of the very few technologies now used in a majority of courses within an institution, and the institutional responsibility described above helping to explain why. (more…)

  • The IMS Is More Important Than You Think It Is

    I have long argued that the development of technical interoperability standards for education are absolutely critical for enabling innovation and personalized learning environments. Note that I usually avoid those sorts of buzzwords—“innovation” and “personalized learning”—so when I use them here, I really mean them. If there are two fundamental lessons we have learned in the last several decades of educational technology development, they are these:

    1. Building monolithic learning environments generally results in building impoverished learning environments. Innovation and personalization happen at the edges of the system.
    2. There are tensions between enabling innovation at the edges and creating a holistic view of student learning and a usable learning environment. Integration does matter.

    To these two education-specific principles, I would add a general principle about software:

    • All software eventually grows old and dies. If you can’t get your data out easily, then everything you have done in the software will die with it (and quite possibly kill you in the process).

    Together, these lessons make the case for strong interoperability standards. But arriving at those standards often feels like what Max Weber referred to as “the strong and slow boring of hard boards.” It is painful, frustratingly slow, and often lacking a feeling of accomplishment. It’s easy to give up on the process.

    Having recently returned from the IMS Learning Impact Leadership Institute, I must say that the feeling was different this time. Some of this is undoubtedly because I no longer serve on any technical standards committees, so I am free to look at the big picture without getting caught up in the horrifying spectacle of the sausage making (to mix Germanic political metaphors). But it’s also because the IMS is just knocking the cover off the ball in terms of its current and near-term prospective impact. This is not your father’s standards body.

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  • Two-Year Anniversary of Blackboard Acquisition of Moodlerooms and NetSpot

    Two years ago today, Blackboard made a dramatic change of course with a series of public announcements:

    At the time I described these changes:

    Most of the discussion in articles and blogs follows the meme of Blackboard entering open source, or even the meme of Blackboard acquiring competitors. I think the news is more significant than either of these two memes.

    Blackboard just did a 180-degree turn on their strategy for their core LMS business. They have moved from consolidating all customers into Learn 9.1 to providing products and services that are almost LMS-agnostic.

    Archive of Statements

    Given this dramatic turn of events, I wrote an additional post that captured the public statements (press releases, blog posts) from Blackboard, Moodlerooms, NetSpot, and even Blackboard competitors for the purpose of checking to see if the acquisitions really did signal a true change in strategy and support for open source. This two-year anniversary seems the perfect time to check up.

    Bb’s Previous Open Source View

    Just how big of a change did the announcements represent? Consider Blackboard’s moves regarding alternative LMS solutions in the previous six years. (more…)

  • 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.

  • 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.