It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about the notion of a Learning Management Operating System (LMOS). There’s some news out of the Sakai world that’s as good an excuse as any for doing returning to it.
Apparently Oracle, with the help of Unicon, is going to do quite a bit of work on Sakai in the form of something they call their “Academic Enterprise Initiative” (AEI). According to Oracle’s white paper on the topic, the work includes (but is not limited to) the following elements:
- Building batch and real-time integration between Sakai and Oracle’s student information system (SIS)
- Creating flexible integration between Sakai and Oracle’s teaching-related products (most notably their portfolio and gradebook).
- Making it possible to swap in Oracle collaboration applications (e.g., their discussion forum, calendar, chat, etc.) to replace the analogous Sakai tools
- Presenting the whole thing through Oracle portal or any other JSR-168-compliant portal (like uPortal, for example)
- Creating a student data hub that allows for disparate applications to share data while providing a single “source of truth” to avoid duplicate and conflicting content versions
There’s a lot here to unpack. In this post I’m going to look at some of the specifics of what Oracle has in mind and why this advances the LMOS cause significantly–even for those institutions that will never use a single Oracle product. In a follow-up post, I’ll drill down into some of the specifics of Oracle’s approach and their implications for teaching and learning.