A visit to IMS Europe 2019
Photo by Vitor Monteiro on Unsplash

A visit to IMS Europe 2019

On the 10th and 11th of October IMS Europe gathered in Barcelona to present and discuss the current status and future direction of IMS standards.

"IMS Global is the world-leading non-profit collaborative advancing edtech interoperability, innovation, and learning impact. IMS enables a plug-and play-architecture and ecosystem that provides a foundation on which innovative products can be rapidly deployed and work together seamlessly." http://www.imsglobal.org/

It has been a while since I dived deep into IMS standards. Most notable for me is a shift in the proposition of IMS standards. It seems it is not only about standards anymore. Moving from version 1.x to version 1.y is 'business as usual'. It is all about adoption of standards nowadays. What good can a standard do when nobody is using it? So, the new goal is to get as much traction for a standard as possible, to make it work and to make it usable. Works needs to be done to get standards adopted. I like that approach. It is more pragmatic, solving real issues and pain points, not trying to achieve the greatest theoretical standard ever. It is also more agile: adopt a standard if it is applicable and works for you. If you need more because a new situation requires it, you enhance the standard or choose something more appropriate. 

Using standards provides flexibility and now we can be flexible when using standards, great! The goal remains the same, using standards to achieve learning impact and improve education.

Roadmap

The roadmap that was presented for new certified releases is shown below.

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The current activities of IMS are:

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Some highlights:

  • With the OpenBadge Connect API it will be possible for the learner to send badges to a particular host platform. Think of this as a federated infrastructure for badge mobility. The learners can take their badges anywhere! This is a good thing, because earning the credential is just the beginning, not the end. The learners journey starts with credentials in their backpack. It is recognized that people are exploring badges and a lot of effort is put into trust. Once badges are trusted and big partners will be using them, it could really take off.
  • The new specification 'comprehensive learner record' is worth mentioning, because it could be the place where CASE, Pathways and OpenBadges meet. 
  • Caliper 1.2 is called the baby of the pack. It is an early stage standard. A lot of effort needs to be put in the semantic profiles. When a lot of data is gathered in an ecosystem, the need to match that data rises. You could call this semantic interoperability. It is good to hear that the work SURF and JISC put into actionable data is appreciated. They are trying to define national frameworks on the use of student data that are most beneficial to the students and institutions and work within the GDPR regulation. More on the national frameworks: SURF in NL: https://www.surf.nl/expertises/benutten-van-studiedata and JISC in the UK: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/learning-analytics
  • OneRoster 1.2 with a new European profile. The goal of this activity is to analyze the oneRoster specification for compatibility with European use cases and requirements and support the creation of alternative solutions. For European adoption of standards this is essential. Similar work is done in Japan. There is room for new participants in this area.
  • A lot of effort is put into the standard for the next decade, EDU-API. Because LIS is getting old and oneRoster is targeted at K12, there is a need for a new standard that support both K12 and Higher Education. EDU-API is all about internationalization and is the first to reflect an underlying unified data model. It is also the first to feed semantic learning records to Caliper. For the development of EDU-API, members look into modern representations like (1) synchronous services based on REST/JSON and (2) asynchronous event driven solutions like the PUB/SUB pattern. Work on the EDU-API is done iteratively, the first release will focus on a small set of entities. Keep an eye on this standard!

Besides the roadmap there are other topics on top of mind, these are the things you must be working on when you are in this business.

LTI advantage

LTI advantage is todays flagship standard of IMS. A lot of big LMS vendors are involved. Besides a new core and new features, it is also interesting to note that a lot of effort is gone into reference implementations. The reference implementations of an LTI platform and LTI libraries move attention to the use of the standards and not toward the technical specification of the standard. That helps adopting a standard a lot. In the future the aspiration is that newcomers read the reference implementation and documentation and are good to go, without reading the whole specification. That would decrease the time to implement a standard. It could be possible to download a library and you are good to go in a matter of minutes.

Future activity in this area will involve the intersection between LTI advantage and actionable data, so the use of LTI tools can be measured using Caliper. Also, adoption of LTI is on the agenda. The community needs to understand the benefits of using LTI within institutions.

The ecosystem

IMS is starting to see the separate standards as part of one ecosystem. You cannot use one single standard anymore when thinking about your digital learning environment (DLE) where standards relate to each other. I could not agree more. This is exactly what we try to achieve at the DLE project at SURF. Think about a unified data model, where objects, attributes and identifiers live that have the same meaning in each standard that is used in the ecosystem. An application can use CASE, oneRoster, LTI or OpenBadges, but when it talks about competencies and courses, make sure it talks about the same concepts as other applications! Work is done on this integration of the standards.

In this ecosystem much emphasis is given to trust and transparency. Where a security framework paves the way for secure use of the data, using industry standards like OIDC and JWT. Also, an improved product directory, certification tools and even a new certification platform, called 1Edtech are under development to ensure that the applications tested are as trustworthy as possible. 

Another part of the ecosystem is using actionable data to improve learning and even user experience is thrown in the mix. EDU-API and expanded Caliper 1.2 profiles will provide usable data for analytics. The attention to the semantics of the data will make it more usable. LTI advantage and QTI provide seamless tool- and assessment experiences for the learners.

Read more

A lot of information was thrown at the participants of the conference, the highlights above indicate the current and future direction of various IMS standards. For more details visit the IMS website and SURF website.

Nita (Agnita) Korsten

Learning Solutions Manager at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Artsen zonder Grenzen

4y

Behalve over yoga, kunnen we het ook wel eens over Digital Learning Environment, API en dergelijke hebben 😊

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