Category Archives: Future of Learning Management

The future of the Learning Management System (LMS), Course Management System (CMS), Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or Instructional Management System (IMS) – where is this category of products going and why?

Western Governors University and the Future of Competency-based Learning

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A special featured keynote by Bob Mendenhall, President of Western Governor’s University at Learning Impact 2013

It really doesn’t matter who you talk to in the education field. Literally all agree that doing a better job of understanding competencies is the way that education needs to move. It’s about what you know and what you can do, rather than what course you took and what grade you got in that course.

Western Governors University (WGU) is the recognized leader in competency-based non-profit higher education in the U.S. We are very pleased that President Bob Mendenhall will be joining us at this year’s Learning Impact 2013 to tell the WGU story and participate in a panel on higher education leadership.

As we do with many of our keynotes at Learning Impact we have published a brief interview article with Bob.

In some respects this is sort of a “coming out” for WGU in that they have been replacing proprietary integrations (those very popular “open APIs” that every vendor likes to promote) with open standards-based integrations using IMS LTI. As the article mentions, WGU has quietly replaced 20 such custom integrations with LTI over the past several years, with probably 30 or so more to go!

Which brings us to the very critical link between competency-based learning and open interoperability standards.  The reason why WGU has so many different applications to integrate is because the best resources in different fields come from different providers.  You might think this circumstance is unique for WGU. It is not even today, but less so in the future. That’s because your departments and faculty want to use these sort of resources – or will be wanting to – and, if they are doing so now they are probably doing it WITHOUT INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRATION AND SUPPORT.  Sorry to get loud there, but frankly we are finding that many educational CIOs need to be woken up to both the challenges and opportunities (for better service) to departments and faculty. Well, in a nutshell, IMS standards are all about enabling this – just as is happening at WGU.

There is more information on how to join this open digital innovation revolution, including two special programs to aid higher ed involvement/adoption (called THESIS) and K-12 involvement/adoption (called I3LC).

 

Is an institutional version of an educational “app store” in your future?

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We hope so! And we hope many universities, school districts and suppliers will collaborate on developing it!

See today’s announcement about the launch of a new collaboration to do just that.

Well, we know that the higher ed market seems to want to keep talking about the LMS, last week’s announcement from MIT and Stanford not withstanding. But, some of us are moving on. For those of us that have been attending Learning Impact the last several years (and, yes, don’t forget to sign up right now for this year’s because space is getting short!), we already know what the future of the “LMS” is (and that the term LMS is a bad name for what it has been or what it will be).  We also know what the general roadmap for digital learning resources is and how this evolution is intertwined with the evolution of the LMS. That’s because the LMS is evolving into a disaggregation of features and resources that come together easily and seamlessly for the needs of teachers and students.

The last few years have popularized, in the consumer world, the app store model. The app store in the consumer context is as much, or more, about controlling purchasing paths and revenue distribution as it is about software that the user interacts with (like iTunes). I have about eight Apple computers in my home and have been a user of Apple since the Lisa. What a stroke of genius Steve Jobs had in envisioning Apple computers at the center of home entertainment/personal digital lifestyle! And, iTunes was the delivery mechanism to make getting the digital resources easy. And, as we know, the 1-click buying, downloading, installing experience has evolved from computer to mobile devices of all shapes and sizes. Hooray!

Success of this model has lead to a lot of imitation by other large consumer-oriented companies and creating similarly vertically integrated buying experiences. To succeed at this you’ve got to have a massive point of sale presence. Amazon became the leader in e-Books. And, Google has the primary competitor to iTunes for mobile devices.

Ease of use/convenience in getting digital resources, evolving to the very popular apps (software applications) has made these vertical stores very appealing. Problem is that they also tend to lock the buyer in to a specific device or family of devices. If I want to switch from iPhone to Samsung Galaxy Note II – which I recently did – I have to start over again with the apps (Yes, the Galaxy Note II is a much better phone than the iPhone – sorry Apple!).

Of course, there are now mobile applications focused on the education segment: as our friend Robbie Kendall Melton from Tennessee Board of Regents has probably the best collection! Problem is that these vertical app stores have created a nightmare for teachers and students who generally need something that cut across many different types of devices (think BYOT). And, in order to make the user experience seamless and productive, educational apps typically require exchange of information (think user data and/or analytics) with other software in the educational enterprise (yes, like an LMS or whatever the LMS evolves to).

So, IMS finds ourselves in an interesting position in that we are going to need to enable a model in education that is not Apple, Google, Amazon (or any proprietary vertical marketplace approach) centric.  The app store project is, at it’s beginning, a collection of universities that are working to define and build a reference implementation of an app store based on open standards, that any content provider can participate in.  The advantage of building apps that utilize the open standards (think APIs – but vendor neutral) is that they will be easily integrated into a seamless teacher and student experience (yes, think 1-click). Now, will it be a gigantic app store with zillions of resources? Probably a smaller set of resources that are much more manageable for each course (while some are in love with the “learning objects in the sky” concept it is not what most faculty have time for).

The IMS educational app store project is in a top-level design phase now – with the expectation that there will be mock-ups and wireframes to discuss at the upcoming Learning Impact. From there we will herd the cats and begin building. The idea is NOT that IMS would maintain some sort of app store.  The idea is that institutions and/or suppliers will collaborate as they see fit in providing institutional or supplier-specific versions that may or may not be coordinated with peer implementations. Contact us if you’d like to get involved.

Briefly back to Apple, Amazon, Google – sorry to have to pick on you guys. But, for education it’s time to move to the next logical phase of the app store concept. The good news is that you can utilize the open app store APIs (or others can) to link the proprietary applications built for your stores into the open educational app store should the educational community wish to do so. It would be much nicer if you would spend a little bit of time and effort to engage or even contribute to the project – but we realize you are very busy making money with your vertical platform strategies and probably won’t help out the education segment.

IMSappstore

 

Question: If You’re from MIT and Stanford Can You Be Dumb?

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Answer: Yes you can. Really dumb.

For evidence see Wired Campus: Stanford U. and edX Will Jointly Build Open-Source Software to Deliver MOOCs

We usually try to show restraint, but every once in a while something comes across the bow that is so completely stupid – well, it has to be addressed.

Here is what I posted as a comment to the above article:

This idea is completely brain-dead. Note to self as Stanford alumni: no more contributions to Stanford fund – as they obviously have plenty of money to waste.

Look – LINUX was based on Unix – which was a very well-baked operating system based on at least 10 years of wide adoption.  How do you create “the LINUX” of anything from a completely new platform?

And, oh by the way, the LMS market is moving to one of interconnected applications based on open standards, namely IMS LTI. This is the model that every one in the know has been talking about, and implementing, for the last three years. I know – I run IMS.  We’ve gone from 0 to over 150 certifications of open standards based products in three years and the curve is accelerating. You can see the many examples here:  http://developers.imsglobal.or…

So, the idea of building a platform that is all encompassing in terms of functionality – even if it is open source – is completely the opposite of where the market is moving.

Finally, when you can’t find a business model, build something and give it away for free – and pretend you have a business model. When you’re living off grants and endowments its a good strategy for delaying the inevitable: failure.  Unfortunately that money could have been used for something useful.

Big data: Cool; Small data: Cooler

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An LTI-based prototype for a Student Progress Dashboard

At the last IMS quarterly meeting in February 2013 at Lone Star College in Houston we spent a lot of time on analytics. Analytics is a pretty hot topic in education these days. In fact, in HED the hype has been off the charts for about two years now. At EDUCAUSE 2011 analytics was the savior, At EDUCAUSE 2012 the hype was more muted – but still strong.

Why? Economics. Retaining one student is worth substantial dollars. Retaining many = mucho dollars. Not to mention national goals for graduating more students – which has a broader impact on any national economy as the delta in wages over a lifetime is large between degreed and non-degreed people.

One of the problems with the term analytics is that it is VERY broad. At our quarterly meeting we had a parade of companies (large & small) as well as very well-informed individuals working in the analytics field.  We learned that there are at least three levels of analytics applicable to education:

  1. Learning analytics: Data analysis that helps students improve learning outcomes.
  2. Academic/program analytics: Data analysis that provides information of what is happening in a specific program and how to plug holes or otherwise adjust.
  3. Institutional analytics: Data analysis that helps make decisions about how to improve at the institutional level.

There is also a fourth level – an even higher level at which governments might crunch numbers to understand a statewide or national level. Since we don’t consider ourselves to be part of the government in IMS, this fourth level is not too interesting to us.

There are some great companies doing some great work in analytics. Companies like Oracle, Desire2Learn, LoudCloud, McGraw-Hill and Civitas Learning – all of whom presented at the IMS quarterly.

And, of course one of the things we have learned previously about domain-specific adaptive tutor/homework applications, like Pearson My-Labs, is that they can make use of data collected across many institutions.

The use of analytics to crunch, and potentially correlate, data from what might not appear to be related things, has appeal to many. For instance, one of the claims made by the CEO of Knewton at the U.S. Whitehouse Data Palooza event last year was that the Knewton product would be able to predict how well a student would do based on what they had to eat for breakfast! That sort of data would be very interesting to Frosted Mini-Wheats, as well as some parents.

Crunching large amounts of data from many sources and then figuring out which data is most useful/predictive is often referred to as making use of “Big Data.”

But, there is also “Small Data.” Small data tends to be more localized, and perhaps, immediately actionable (see non-education article on Why Small Data May be Bigger than Big Data). As Mark Milliron said at Learning Impact 2011, “Students are good with collecting data on them if it can actually help them as individuals.”  This makes a lot of sense to us at IMS.

Now, of course, data interoperability can potentially aid analytics because agreed upon data definitions used across many tools/products should be easier to compare. Analytics is a really important focus area for IMS – and will be a key focus at this year’s Learning Impact 2013 conference May 13-16 in San Diego.

The sort of “holy grail” of data interoperability is an agreed upon “learning/progress map” that all tools and assessments could populate. Some are working on that very issue today (see for instance the Dynamic Learning Maps collaborative that is participating in IMS via CETE at University of Kansas). However, while it is relatively straightforward to agree on some types of data – like for instance assessment item results data as in QTI/APIP or usage data on things like e-books – the state of the market is that student learning models and data is in its infancy. Therefore, many tools will be producing analytics information that makes sense within the tool, but not more generally. IMS wants to put in place standards that encourage that type of innovation through variability, as well as the type of standards that capture things everyone can agree on.

To enable more use of small data in education, it occurred to us that it would be very cool if it was easier for students or teachers to simply see all of the progress data in one place – even though the tools are all separate. What a major step forward it would be for a student to work in several tools and be able to see how their results compared. So, we decided to see if LTI could be used to enable a Student Progress Dashboard that is a mash-up of many dashboards from independent tools. We see such a dashboard as displaying the unique analytics capabilities of any tool – whether or not data definitions are agreed to – and, whether or not the tool provider is willing to share such data. We think this very simple idea is empowering and will complement the progress we are making on defining agreed data fields when we can.

And, now we have a very simple prototype to show one version of the concept – using tools that are not especially analytical in nature – but ones we had lying around.  If you go to this screencast by Stephen Vickers you will see the very first IMS-enabled Student Progress Dashboard prototype. We expect this to be a standard feature to be supported in LTI going forward and want to see lots of riffing on this in the LTI community! Let us know what you think! And, tool providers, start your engines!

Note that we may not be able to tell how well a student will perform based on what they had for breakfast, as perhaps Knewton can, but, we can perhaps make a combination of tools – tools available today – more actionable for students or teachers!

Student_Progress_Dashboard_Prototype

IMS LTI-Enabled Student Progress Dashboard Prototype

Collaboration Enables Next-Generation Digital Learning

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IMS open standards in educational technology are all about enabling innovation. Innovation means diversity.

Never was that more apparent than on February 5, 2013 at the annual EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference, where to a packed room representatives from UMass Online, Lone Star College Online and University of Michigan described how they were each leveraging IMS standards. For those that could not attend the proceedings have been captured in a just released EDUCAUSE Blog post.

Collaboration Enables Next-Generation Digital Learning

Each of the three institutions are providing leadership in addressing how technology can be better utilized to enable teachers and students. By taking advantage of the IMS standards as a core element in providing these solutions, these institutions are collaborating and reinforcing each other’s progress – even though they are all addressing different areas of innovation. Similarly they are collaborating with a very wide range of suppliers who are using and advancing the same standards. Being part of a worldwide community without having to even know who the other participants are (just as happened in the development and growth of the worldwide web) and how they are all improving the future of education is pretty cool!  This is the 10-100x factor in education we call the IMS Open Digital Innovation Revolution.

Come to Learning Impact, May 13-16 3013 in San Diego and join the revolution!

Evolving to digital curriculum based on open interoperability standards, Part II

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The Importance of Interoperability in Achieving the Potential Advantages of Digital Curriculum

In part I of this blog series on Evolving to Digital Curriculum we covered five potential benefits of digital materials and the spectrum of approaches we are seeing in the marketplace for enabling more digital options for teachers and students.

In part II we will address the roles and importance of interoperability standards in the evolution to digital curriculum. We also discuss a common sense ordering of “putting standards in place” based on feedback from the market.

Now, when we say “standard” we could mean a lot of things, as standards in their best sense mean a voluntary collaboration among education community participants on the technical approach to interoperability as well as a fair/neutral decision-making process. However, the following paragraphs are just as relevant if what we mean by an interoperability standard is one agreed upon way for two applications to exchange information necessary for those applications to work together in well-defined way (in comparison to multiple and diverse ways to accomplish essentially the same thing).

Here is our explanation of the critical role of interoperability standards in evolving to digital curriculum, specifically with respect to achieving the five potential benefits outlined in part I.

  1. Potentially lower cost. Some people seem to think that all digital learning materials should be free because the distribution costs of an additional copy (once the digital version has already been produced) are essentially zero. A very small zealot group of “free software” advocates have come to the same conclusion regarding software. However, for those of us that live in the real world and want to see higher and higher quality digital products, it is very obvious that digital materials will still have a cost associated with them – and the price will be market-driven – meaning it may be lower, or may even be higher than today’s printed books. Regardless, it is very clear that having to reformat digital learning into a wide array of formats to run a wide variety of devices and software platforms (e.g. Apple, Google, Amazon, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Instructure, Moodle, Pearson, Global Scholar) will add cost to the production equation. Even if the set of options in the education space were limited and static this is a daunting situation. It even becomes a “competitive” situation where content providers try to “be the first to market” on newer and sexier platforms with large market share. While this may all seem “fun” to the end users the reality here is that the dollars spent on essentially reformatting and recoding are dollars NOT spent on creating better learning materials. And, the cost of having to deal with the diverse platforms is shifted to the end-users (teachers and students) and the IT departments who must figure out how to equitably support BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology). Unless innovative digital learning experiences are easy to support in the educational context, well, they just won’t get incorporated. Thus, the critical need for interoperability between content and platforms to help remove the cost associated with platform diversity is very clear. While the worldwide web interoperability standards (such as HTML 5 managed by the W3C) and browsers (as the ‘platforms’) go a long way to providing content interoperability, they are lacking with respect to some key additional constructs used frequently in education, but rarely in the generic worldwide web (such as assessment).
  2. More interactive and engaging. It has been very encouraging and exciting to see exciting new learning innovations each year as finalists in the IMS Learning Impact Awards, such as game-based learning, adaptive tutors, social learning and simulations. Some of the most innovative applications come from small start-ups with very limited resources. Unless innovative digital learning experiences are easy for IT, teachers and students, as well as suppliers, to integrate into the educational context, well, they just won’t get incorporated. The hurdles that get in the way are multiple logins, manual transfer of enrollment information, passing of other parameters that enable students to interact in the right groups and so on. If every application and platform accomplishes these integrations with their own APIs (Application Program Interfaces) – all of which evolve over time – well, its difficult to get any reasonable number of tools integrated in the first place, much less maintained over the years. Most IT departments at even well-funded institutions struggle with care and feeding of 3-5 integrations. Therefore, there is a very obvious and critical need for interoperability standards to make “plug and play” of innovative digital tools and learning experiences easy.
  3. More personalized and accessible.  The popular idea of “learning objects” – meaning chunks of content or learning experiences – that can be delivered at the right place and the right time, is not new. This has been the primary objective that people have been envisioning with the explosion of the Internet/worldwide web, as well as before with CBT (computer based training). In fact there have been many products over the last 20 years that have focused on this approach – with adaptive tutors/homework applications perhaps now becoming the most successful in the education context (while still penetrating only a relatively small percentage of the market). The goal is personalized learning. However, in order for this to work when more than one content/application provider/source is involved requires a lot of interoperability to make finding the right resource at the right time tractable for teachers or students. First of all, for highly relevant objects to be “found” there needs to be some agreement on the metadata used to search for them. This metadata not only describes the content, but also potentially the state/progress of student learning, so that the two can be compared. Now, once the right object is found there are potentially the same integration issues as detailed in (1) and (2) above. The other very important aspect of personalization is accessibility. Not only do students have preferences for how they can best learn digitally (audio vs. visual, font size and type, etc.) but the exploding use of a rapidly evolving array of tablet devices both mean that alternative representations of learning objects that fit the user and usage are required. Without interoperability standards to enable user preferences and platform versatility, the development of content and apps becomes much more expensive than today’s printed books.
  4. Producing usable data. As mentioned in (3), a primary foundation of achieving personalized learning digitally is the need to describe student progress. The concept of progress is often thought of as a learner profile and the potential prescribed paths are often referred to as learning maps. As with (3), if the application is completely self-contained and does not provide data to other applications then interoperability is not required. However, if it is desired to have multiple content/applications/assessments work together to help teachers and students, then interoperability standards for activities, outcomes, learner profiles and learning maps become critical. While one can certainly conceive of a data warehouse with a huge amount of data not complying to any standard, the degree to which aspects of student progress can be agreed upon can potentially be more actionable. Of course, this is the goal for standardized testing and other forms of assessment.
  5. Easier to transport. One laptop or notebook computer certainly weighs less and takes less space than multiple paper textbooks. But, if we put all of the learning materials into an accepted format, such as PDF, this would allow us to eliminate the books without making any progress on potential benefits (2), (3) or (4). Worse yet, it is entirely possible that the teacher, student and IT department could end up having to deal with a myriad of platforms (because not all apps and content run on all platforms) AND textbooks. Yikes! More cost, more weight, more space. Thus, an absence of interoperability standards could  and probably is resulting in the worse possible scenario for students, teachers and institutions.

Now, since relatively little interoperability as required for personalized digital learning per the above exists today in the marketplace, a natural question to ask is “where is the best place to start?” Another way to ask this question is “what needs to come first in order to enable evolution over time to personalized digital learning?”

The method for determining such things in IMS is to start multiple threads of action and see which ones the market adopts first. Absent of third-party incentives (such as grants that favor one priority over another) the education community participants are pretty smart about building their future. It is very difficult to achieve market adoption of a “standard” when there is large diversity and competition among approaches. In such cases it is better to consider early developments as potential input to the standards process – rather than as a standard.

The good news is that the answer is clear based on actual market activity. In recent years, the IMS community has overwhelmingly adopted standards that provide basic plumbing to enable learning platforms, content and applications to “plug and play.” These are the standards in IMS known as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), Common Cartridge and Learning Information Services (LIS). In addition, IMS members are adopting Question & Test Interoperability (QTI) and the Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP) for providing interoperability of assessments (Note: Common Cartridge also includes a version of QTI and APIP is based on the Common Cartridge structure – so we have consistency in standards approach across learning and assessment resources). These standards are the simple “glue” that enable a seamless experience for the users, while dramatically reducing the time and cost of integration and upkeep (by a factor of 10-100x).

“Linked content” is a very popular form of interoperability that applies to hosted content, tools, simulations, adaptive tutors, games

Using this collection of standards – which IMS calls the Digital Learning Services (DLS) Standards – content and apps are plugging into institutional systems like never before. Over 150 certifications for plug and play have been issued to date – all is the last few years – and accelerating today.

For those institutions, states, districts worldwide that wish to take advantage of the progress IMS has achieved in market adoption of these standards, especially those wanting to put in place a strong foundation for digital curriculum and personalized digital learning, IMS has recently released a document that describes how to specify requirements for digital content and applications based on open standards. Please read the press release and the document: Open-Standards Requirements for Digital Content and Application Integration with Enterprise Learning Platforms – and let us know if you have any questions! We are pleased to help all institutions and states evolve to open standards.

Does this mean that IMS is ignoring the other areas such as outcomes data, analytics, profiles or learning maps? Absolutely not. IMS has been active in these areas for years and is in the process of rolling these out at market speed, using the DLS standards as the backbone.  The prioritization comes around supporting key market drivers, such as support for the U.S. Common Core State Standards, the rise of e-textbooks, the need for federated search (as integration of multiple products grows), etc. IMS members that are experts and experienced market participants in each area are driving each area – and these requirements are addressed in incremental/evolved versions of the specifications. Such evolution also allows for region specific variations, as depending on the interoperability area, there can be some significant diversity. This is of course less true in the plumbing layer.

In the next installment, part III, we will address the spectrum of three scenarios for evolving to a digital learning ecosystem. Whereas the discussion above and RFP guidance that IMS has produced will help you regardless of which of the scenarios you chose, there is a clearly preferred approach that makes sense for today and probably the next 5-10 years. Perhaps surprisingly, our view is VERY different than what is being encouraged by huge investment from the Gates Foundation in projects like LRMI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) and SLC (Shared Learning Collaborative) / InBloom.  We will explain in part III.


 

Joining the Digital Revolution!

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Editor’s note: this is a guest post provided by Steve Kessinger, Director of IST, Bluefield College.

Online learning continues to evolve, keeping even the most accomplished educators on their toes. There are numerous tools and resources available to supplement online education and I’m sure your faculty, like ours are becoming more interested in these resources. They also expect them to be fully integrated within the course.

The technical challenges to a small school like Bluefield College can be overwhelming which is why we were excited to hear about the Learning Tools Portlet in Jenzabar e-Learning. So many vendors have boasted “sure, we integrate with your system” but what that really translates to is “we integrate with your system as long as your IT guys spend 6 months in a cave banging out code”. We have a total staff of 3.5 FTE; we just don’t have time for that. Using the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, we now have the ability to integrate a number of solutions that we once thought were beyond our capability. And it’s easy!

It only takes a simple click to get started (+ Add a new learning tool).

User Window within Jenzabar JICS for Integrating an LTI Tool/Application 1 of 2

Then, all we need is a link, key, and secret provided to us by the vendor and we’re ready to go.

User Window within Jenzabar JICS for Integrating an LTI Tool/Application 2 of 2

We’ve even started recommending LTI compliance to vendors. It’s a real return on investment for us and for them. We get the advantage of being able to integrate a number of tremendous products into our learning environment and we don’t have to use our limited resources on custom integrations since LTI is so easy. It’s also advantageous to the vendor since it allows them to serve other Jenzabar e-Learning customers and other LTI compliant LMS solutions. We’re currently testing LTI resources and we’re hoping that we can have some of these tools incorporated in courses for the Spring.

LTI 2: The future is here again, just a lot easier than once envisioned

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Yesterday IMS announced the public draft release of LTI 2 at the IMS quarterly meetings in Nashville.

Here is what it’s all about:

Whereas LTI 1 has revolutionized (by 10-100x – see the revolution blog post) the time and cost of integrating digital content and resources into learning platforms at a pretty basic level, LTI 2 takes that same revolution at least 10x more to enable much more sophisticated and deeper integrations – with therefore even greater gains in speed and cost compared to today’s proprietary integrations.

Public draft release means that IMS is encouraging public feedback and collaboration on alpha implementations.  Within the IMS member community we will be enabling such prototyping with a software implementation of an LTI consumer (in Ruby) developed by Vital Source.  Many thanks for Vital Source for leading the evolution to LTI 2 (along with Pearson, Blackboard and Cengage) and providing this software to help accelerate implementations!  The license for this code is purely for non-commercial use at this time because the next step to finalizing LTI 2 is for the IMS member community coming together to put in place a conformance certification program. Once the conformance certification program is in place, we will release any prototype code (that provided by Vital Source, improvements made by other members, or by others in other programming languages) with our IMS “traditional” Apache 2 open source licensing to encourage commercial implementation. We’re thinking that conformance certification may be ready in 3-6 months time – but this is entirely dependent on the contributions from the IMS community.

LTI 2 has been under development for about 5 years.  Originally LTI 2 was envisioned as the “industrial strength” enterprise version of LTI. In fact, at one point in time what is now LTI 2 was the only true LTI.  The current LTI 1 was a result of a simplified subset and implementation approach of LTI 2 – resulting in the infamous Dr. Chuck Severance led evolution of first Simple LTI, then Basic LTI – and what is now LTI 1 and the most recently released version LTI v1.1 (which supports outcomes reporting back to the consumer).

Thanks to a series of very good decisions made by the IMS member community, LTI 2 today is much easier to implement than was once envisioned! For standards, easy is essential!

Of course, the value of LTI 2 to the education community – and how soon that value manifests itself – will depend on how quickly various “learning platforms” become LTI 2 consumers. If you have “LTI 2’d” your application it still needs LTI 2 platforms to run in.  One of the great things about LTI is that it enables many types of software to be consumers of applications. Anything can plug into anything with LTI. (see LTI catalogue to see that some applications that are both consumers and tools).

LTI 1 will be supported indefinitely at this point.  In fact, there is much activity in developing LTI 1 extensions (see extensions web page).  The IMS members made the brilliant decision at the IMS quarterly meetings in Ann Arbor in August 2012 to ensure that all LTI 1 extensions would be created in a way to feed right into the more extensible LTI 2 architecture. We expect that most platforms will support both LTI 1 and LTI 2.

LTI has many advantages over LTI 1. Some of these are detailed in the briefing paper written by Stephen Vickers via JISC CETIS.

LTI 2 provides a more sophisticated and extensible platform for providing deeper integrations, and greater support for services and events. For example, tool providers will be able to specify where their links should appear in the LMS and provide support for user-selected languages. LMSs may notify tool providers when a course is copied, archived or restored to allow more dynamic messaging and updates between systems. LTI 2 builds on LTI 1 by incorporating more sophisticated outcomes reporting and a rich extensions architecture. LTI 2 uses REST and JSON-LD to deliver this new functionality.

IMS LTI Roadmap presented early in 2012 by Dr. Chuck

To me, what is exciting about LTI 2 is that we should be able to transition IMS certified products to a model of “negotiated services.”  What negotiated services means is that IMS certified product A and IMS certified product B will be able to communicate about which IMS standards they support and configure themselves accordingly. This capability brings our mantra of “plug and play” to a whole new level.

At a very basic level, what this means is that if there is a mismatch in terms of what version of an IMS specification supports (versus the connecting tool) tow connecting products support it can be discovered automatically and adjusted.  At another level what LTI 2 means is that the goofy list of export formats for content (when exporting a course) could go away: the exporting software can communicate with the accepting software and negotiate the maximum interoperable subset. Many of the IMS specifications involve optional levels of functionality – specifications like Learning Information Services (LIS) and the Accessible Portable Item Protocol/Question and Test Interoperability (APIP/QTI).  Ultimately, LTI 2 will allow the support of these services to be negotiated between certified applications.

Last week at EDUCAUSE CourseSmart announced a new analytics dashboard for users of their e-Textbooks.  The CourseSmart analytics dashboard is LTI 1 enabled. What this means is that it can use LTI 1 to plug into an LMS or other LTI consumer. However, what about the transfer of outcomes using LTI? CourseSmart is, in fact, participating on our IMS e-textbook task force who are undertaking defining LTI extensions for passing “back” usage data. But, we expect that analytics information will be an area of differentiation for suppliers. In other words, we don’t expect all suppliers to agree.  One of the things that LTI 2 could enable is a negotiation of what data will be passed. For instance, one of a few designated schemas of agreed data or even custom schemas held in a registry. Thus, LTI 2 will put in place a foundation for enabling interoperability even for product-specific schemas. Pretty cool!

My thanks to the IMS members for the dedicated work on LTI 2! Stay tuned.

 

Takeaways from EDUCAUSE 2012: Suppliers are Rockin’ to IMS; HED Institutions Just Beginning

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The annual EDUCAUSE conference is a bit of a marker for IMS. Once a project within EDUCAUSE (begun in 1995), IMS spun out in 1999 as its own non-profit member consortium.  So, we try to have a presence each year at the conference and take stock. Adoption of IMS standards is exploding across K-20 right now: Common Cartridge, Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), Learning Information Services (LIS) and Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP).

Rob Abel, IMS Global & Derek Hamner of Learning Objects Talk IMS Revolution

It’s been interesting to see the evolution of IMS over the past few years at EDUCAUSE from a techie topic to now a strategy topic as well. As the world economy slowly recovers, digital content and apps make their way into education, and a growing wave of excitement and investment in new companies and products, some of the institutional leaders are asking the right strategic question: how do I better serve my customers in this new world? 

This year at EDUCAUSE for the first time (in the next several years I expect) we began referring to IMS as a “revolution.”

One of Three IMS Revolution Banners at EDUCAUSE 2012

In my humble opinion, it is the type of revolution that education needs: one that solves some immediate tactical issues, improves efficiency from day one, but also puts in place a strategy that enables better service from IT to the end-users in this increasingly digital and mobile world. Most importantly it is a revolution focused on impact of technology in improving the success of the teachers and students.

It’s helping to enable and catalyze change in education that IMS Global is most interested in – but, we are interested in sustainable change. Change that is not a fad or blip in the long history of educational institutions, but rather a new foundation. The specific change we’re interested in making happen is to drive the time and cost of integration of innovative digital content and applications in the education space as close to zero as it can get. If we do that – as an IMS community – many good things follow: a more open market, more innovation, more expenditures on educational technology versus other less innovative things, less waste on every supplier and every institution “reinventing the integration wheel.”

Here are my top five takeaways from this year’s conference as it relates to the IMS mission – which are based on a combination of things talked about openly at the conference as well as privately:

IMS Adoption is Accelerating

  1. The IMS revolution is viral now with most HED suppliers. We were showing the chart of growth to over 125 IMS certifications issued in the last couple of years and my rough guess is that this is about 50% of the actual adoption of IMS in the market. At this point, if a supplier is not in some way taking advantage of the 10-100x cost and time advantage of IMS (see IMS revolution blog post) – well, they are at a significant disadvantage. It is pretty hard to find an education-focused supplier that is not on board – whether they are actually an IMS member or not.  The suppliers that are not are typically the large “non-educational” companies that have development groups that basically don’t care about education. This category of companies is really missing the boat because with a little amount of work they could really endear themselves to our education market – but it is just the way they are set up: the development organizations within them are focused on non-education needs and that typically means their own proprietary platforms.
  2. CIOs that are “leaders of change” get the IMS value proposition – and because there is a critical mass of them, we will start to see more institutional policy supporting adoption of standards – in fact, we already are. 10x-100x improvement in cost and time of integrating digital content and apps would seem to be a total no-brainer. But, let’s face it, most edu CIOs run more on fear of uncertainty than they do opportunity for making change happen. So be it.  If we needed 100% or even a majority of CIOs to get the benefits of standards and why they actually need to do something about it – well, let’s just say I would have thrown in the towel a long time ago.  IMS has a core group of true leaders, some CIOs and some in executive positions focused on educational technology in institutions that get it and are helping us roll out an initiative called THESIS (Technology in HED in Support of Innovation for Student Success). This program will be a collaboration of leaders to lead institutional adoption. In IMS almost seven years now I have found that any size or type of institution (or school district or state) can lead but it depends on having someone in charge who is capable of truly leading.  It’s the people in charge that matter and not the size or type of institution.
  3. Some apple carts are going to get upset in the short term (1-3 years). This is why IMS is a real revolution. Some suppliers make money from integrations being “difficult or perceived as difficult.” However, once a cat is out of the bag it is hard to put it back in. One way or the other IT is going to become “easy” in the education segments. It has to. Most colleges and school districts – even those perceived as large – are small in terms of technical resources. The users are not technical.  They need simple and easy. The good news is that there is a lot of opportunity for suppliers in making the revolution happen.  But, this is not just a supplier apple cart issue.  This is also a CIO apple cart issue – the one’s that have said to me: “We already have people that do custom integrations, so more efficient integration doesn’t save us anything.”  Oops. Wrong answer! If a CIO or other technology executive is focused on the customer (students, teachers, even administrators), as opposed to their own or somebody else’s job security, they will embrace this change. However, see point #2 above. I can only tell you that this is a change that is going to happen – it’s as predictable as the outsourcing of email was – so, in the longer run embracing and moving with it is probably a better career strategy for all concerned.
  4. There is a lot of concern about the amount of private equity in this marketplace. Everyone seems to get it (somewhat to my surprise, I might say) that private equity firms are typically “not friends of investing in innovation.” All I can say is that ultimately, if this turns out to be true (and I sincerely hope it does not), it will create more opportunity for up and coming innovative suppliers. In either case open standards from IMS are going to play a huge role.  What most people don’t get is that the “giant” suppliers in education are really pretty small. Of the $1.4 trillion revenue annually in the U.S. related to education (2012 estimate), well, only 3% is spent on technology of any kind.   Another way to think of it is that if you looked at the operating budgets of all 4000 universities in the U.S. – it is estimated to be about $535 billion.  Since there are very few educational suppliers or education segment suppliers within larger companies that ever make it to $1 billion annual revenue, well, it’s clear that the “big dog” in this market are the institutions themselves. The institutions are really, in the big picture of things, the primary “suppliers” of revenue-producing goods (non-profit, for-profit or whatever). This is an important follow on point to 1-3 above in that higher education institutions are potentially in “control of their own destiny” when it comes to greater innovation and getting technology that meets the needs of teaching and learning. They do, however, need to coordinate to some degree. Reality is that this is what groups like IMS are good for – and in our case I’d say it is all the better because supportive suppliers are around the table. It is the whole community of institutions and educational suppliers that are going to create the future. I hope!  The alternative is Google or Apple come in from the outside and take over.  Think iTunes U equals the primary distribution point for education. What a nightmare! Lock-in is tolerable for individuals, but not institutions.
  5. “Happy talk” keynotes are inspiring, but leave us a little empty after all is said and done: Many points of light do not get us to a bon fire of change! It’s fun to watch the inspirational tweets when someone like Clay Shirkey speaks. Of course, it’s good to feel good and empowered that we can do it! We can be innovative!  We can stick it to the man! Etc. Me too! I’m sure there is a positive subliminal effect from this sort of thing.  A little more sobering was this year’s data from the man with data about higher ed IT, Casey Green, which included the chart shown below that shows a very large discrepancy between the perceived return on IT investment among college presidents, provosts and CIOs. I encourage you to get more information at CampusComputing.net. The one sentence summary is that where CIOs may think they are getting reasonable return on the investment in IT, well, their customers, ah, not so much. The bottom line, IT needs to do better – either in terms of communicating the value or providing the value, or both.  Since few, if any, IT shops are getting more resourced going forward, well, it really is a time to “do better with less.”  Notice I did not say “more” – because this is really about giving customers what they want/need – not about more mindless technology expenditures.   I really don’t know any other way to make this happen than to become less reactive and more thoughtful about where things are going and putting in place a better operational foundation going forward. That, of course, is what the IT leaders involved in IMS are doing – and I’m pleased that our organization has a very clear value proposition and ROI with respect to institutional participation.  10-100x cost and time savings on integrations is a big time “better.”

Campus Computing Survey Data on IT Investment Effectiveness

And there you have it.  A lot of this IMS open digital innovation revolution stuff is of the famous “think globally and act locally” kind. There are definitely some things out there that help you (in the singular sense) and help you (in the plural sense). That would be the IMS revolution. The revolution will not be televised.  Made possible by the IMS member organizations.

 

You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, the IMS Open Digital Innovation Revolution has begun

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We’re talking about the IMS Open Digital Innovation Revolution in Education this week at EDUCAUSE 2012 Denver.

Here’s what it is all about:

After several years of IMS community effort (led by the IMS Global Contributing Member organizations), we are now seeing evidence of a 10-100x improvement in the cost and time of digital technology and content integration based on the IMS standards, collectively known as the Digital Learning Services Standards (Common Cartridge, Learning Tools Interoperability and Learning Information Services).

So, at EDUCAUSE this year, we are shifting our communication focus a bit toward institutional tech leaders (CIOs, academic technology, online learning leaders).  Why? So they can take full advantage of the revolution and engage in sustaining the open digital revolution and taking it even further!  See the IMS agenda at EDUCAUSE 2012 here.  (Note: There will be free IMS revolution T-shirts at most events thanks to the organizations that have sponsored the various sessions).

IMS will be introducing the THESIS Initiative at EDUCAUSE 2012 with the goal of helping institutions adopt and lead the Open Digital Innovation Revolution

Since this is a public blog and I don’t have the time to get official permissions I will simply state some of the quotes we have heard in recent weeks from serious implementers of IMS:10x-100x improvement? Yes.

“It used to take us 6 months to do a custom integration – we now have that down to a phone call and will soon eliminate that.”

“Typically it would cost us $200,000 to translate our content to for use in another platform, now its about $20,000.”

 “Over the last 7 years we have done many integrations into our LMS – and the time required per integration ranges from 300-600 hours – with IMS it is down to 5 hours.”

“We made our new LMS purchase pleased to know that IMS conformance means that we will never be held hostage to our course content again.”

“We did an analysis of costs and we have found that using IMS for integration has cost us 8-10x less than our previous approach.”

Folks – this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Most importantly, not only is cost and time being saved, but the end-users: students, professors, administrators, are getting a better user experience – more seamless and requiring less manual effort to enter logins and enter data. And, the net-net for more efficient investment in and lower barriers to educational technology innovation is dramatic. Collectively we ALL need to invest on providing great digital education tools – not reinventing the integration wheel over and over and over and over.

Why do we need an “open digital innovation revolution” in education? Several reasons:

  1. In education we do not have 2-3 dominate platform and/or content suppliers that provide everything and therefore you can pick one and go digital (vice Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft in the consumer world).
  2. In education we need very efficient IT to support a diversity of teaching methods, disciplines and age groups.
  3. In education many of the most innovative ideas and technologies occur “from the inside out” – the education community are co-creators of the content and the applications.
  4. In education we have one of the most diverse ecosystems of open source software and open content, which increasingly need to come together with proprietary solutions.
    The future of education technology is not about one way or the highway – it’s about diversity of supply sources.
  5. Cost and scale is an issue: Technology really does need to help education and educators become more efficient – wasting time on custom integrations is bad policy

The 10-100x cost and time improvement that the IMS open standards will enable the digital education world in the way that it needs to be enabled to succeed in the ultimate goal: better educational experiences widely obtained.  You are falling 10-100x behind the curve as of right about now.

However, do not fear– adding your product to the revolution actually doable and pretty easy! It actually saves you time and money and does not hurt your brain. We find that 92.6% of brains really like it! (Note: I made that number up – my anecdotal evidence is actually 100% of brains like it!).  And, it’s not too late – in fact, this whole digital education thing is really just starting.

Here is a chart graphing two indicators of the revolution.  One plot is the growth in IMS conformance certifications issued the last few years. As you can see, this is greater than 125 now and an accelerating curve. You can take a look at the plug and play LTI tool catalog here.  The other plot is the growth of IMS members since 2006.

The open digital innovation revolution has very solid momentum!

I think the key points about the IMS open digital innovation revolution for education are:

  1. In the digital age institutions will require much more efficient and effective integration of a wide variety of digital content and applications
  2. IMS open interoperability standards provide an open foundation for 10-100x cost/time reduction to achieve a seamless interface to enterprise systems
  3. IMS standards as an institutional or product strategy radically improve the ability of the education community (suppliers and institutions) to focus on innovation
  4. Your organization can support this work in a variety of ways – helping to ensure its success and accelerate its progress

To the last point, at EDUCAUSE 2012 we will also begin to introduce our higher education THESIS Initiative (Technology in Higher Education in Support of Innovation and Student Success). We will be providing more information on this – it’s a way for institutions to implement the open digital revolution in terms of putting in place a policy and a strategy.  Stay tuned!

Really all that the IMS Global Learning Consortium provides is the place for like-minded organizations around the world – who want to support the Open Digital Education Innovation Revolution – and who understand that to get there a collaboration to remove unnecessary friction and accelerate progress is a good thing – suppliers, institutions, government organizations alike.  If you agree with the stuff in this post, you and your organization should be joining in! And hope to see you at EDUCAUSE 2012 or the IMS Quarterly Meeting the week after (Nov 12-15) in Nashville.