Bringing the cloud into your LMS
The Web can be a wonderful place, filled with an un-estimable number of great tools and content that have tremendous teaching and learning potential. At the same time though, there is so much material on it that is completely inappropriate to have accessable from a learning environment.
As we move towards digital curricula, more integrated online learning environments, adapt and adopt technologies for use in education, many schools and other educational organisations are implementing Learning Management Systems (LMS's). These have been around for quite some time and are mature and very sophisticated applications however they are far from ubiquitous. This post is for those that use LMS's and other online learning environments, and those that understand them.
LMS vendors, no matter how good they are and how fast they can roll out new functionality, cannot keep up with the pace of the Web. New content and services are being introduced at an astounding rate. There will always be someone who can do something better or something new that is really useful and has great applicability in the classroom. The best of the vendors recognise this and for some time have allowed plugins, widgets, blocks etc to be integrated into their environments. Trouble is - they all had their own unique way of doing it so if you are a small tool/service provider, in order to get your tool into their LMS's, you would have to write custom interfaces for each of the LMS's you wanted to integrate with (a difficult and costly exercise for small providers).
Enter IMS LTI. The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS) "is a global, nonprofit, member association that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning and educational technology industries through collaborative support of standards, innovation, best practice and recognition of superior learning impact." IMS has quite a number of technical specifications to support the use of technology within an educational context however three of those specifications form the core of their 'Digital Learning Services'. These are:
I will endeavor to look at the broader Digital Learning Services in more detail in a later post but for the moment I am interested in exploring Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). LTI allows you to 'launch' an external tool from within (typically) an LMS. There is a great overview of LTI here by Dr. Chuck which is well worth a look at if you want a much better explanation than I can offer.
LTI comes in two flavours (three if Basic LTI Simple Outcomes gets the promotion it deserves!). These are:
- Basic Learning Tools Interoperability
- Learning Tools Interoperability
Essentially Basic LTI allows an LMS to 'launch' an external tool while full LTI will allow you to launch that tool and return some data back to the LMS from the tool.
In LTI terminology, an LMS is known as a Tool Consumer (TC). The external tool is known as a Tool Provider (TP). Tool providers can really be any manner of interesting Web 2.0 style services, content etc, making for great potential teaching and learning opportunities. A Tool Consumer is not restricted to an LMS either. An LMS is simply a 'context' of a TC. It could also be a portal or any other type of Web environment that may be used in the delivery of learning.
Security is supported via the use of OAuth. Using OAuth, teachers/tool providers are able to ensure that only authorised users (eg students) are able to launch and play the tool.
For teachers this is great - often they are restricted in their access to the Web in schools. You can easily imagine though how getting access to great tools and content and making them available through a safe and secure channel in the LMS could open up the classroom to some fantastic services from the Web.
We have trialled Basic LTI as both a tool consumer and tool provider and are keen to go through the conformance testing from IMS to get listed as compliant.
I can imagine a whole market opening up for small tool providers as they now have access to significant markets via LTI compliant LMS's that are used by education departments and schools worldwide.
The following is a short video highlighting the experience of one such provider:
Cheers,
Jerry
