Curtiss Barnes' blog

Unless you were paying close attention the last few weeks, you probably missed an important series of events and announcements in the world of interoperability standards for the learning industry.

One of the "beauties" of standards and standards organizations is that there are so many of them, but few actually are what they claim to be - standards. In my opinion, getting to be a standard should require, at a minimum, 1) a common design specification; 2) created by a community of trading partners (meaning balanced, but not undercut or diluted, by the interests of all parties); 3) developed with the goal of eliminating "friction" in the market; 4) adopted by an ever-increasing share of the market (which in this case should mean the students and academics who are at the heart and soul of the industry) and 5) established in a manner that ensures long term sustainability.

Which is precisely why I think we are at a bit of an inflection point in the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS, nee IMS Enterprise) specification; here's the most recent part of the story (the inflection point?) in reverse chronological order^:

• Pearson Education announced on November 5th that they intend to adopt LIS and work with Oracle to integrate a variety of their learning solutions including MyLabs and Mastering products as well as their newly announced LearningStudio platform (a combination of eCollege and Fronter). Several millions of students use these products.
• IMS CEO Rob Abel, on November 4th, highlighted the support of LIS from a number of student system vendors, namely Oracle, SunGardHE and Jenzabar. Tens of millions of students worldwide, and probably more than a million faculty, use these three vendors' products.
• That same day, in his annual update on the Campus Computing Survey, Casey Green showed data that indicates academic computing organizations and resources are under pressure, all while more classes adopt LMS, and new technologies like wikis, ebooks and other Web 2.0 technologies are in ever-greater demand for instructional use.
• Generally Available (GA) as of October 30th, the SAIP, Oracle's implementation of LIS , has batch and event-based integration with multi-target integration capability and the whole functional overlay with the ability to scope and associate classes down to the granular level.
• Gilfus Education, on October 27th, predicted that the "combination of academic and administrative functionality into a more cohesive experience" will be among the top innovation trends. While they've got their own approach to resolving that demand, I think they've got the trend right.
• On October 22nd, at the IMS Quarterly meeting, a collection of vendors, institutions and organizations met to discuss the role the LIS specification and its potential for expansion into ever greater scope encompassing the administrative and academic functionality. Another outcome of this session was the announcement of the LIS Alliance and the next phase of conformance definition to ensure long-term sustainability of the standard.
• At the same IMS meeting, on October 21st, Oracle demonstrated real-time, LIS based integration to not one, but three independent systems that could play a role in the learning arena - Sakai, Inigral's Schools on Facebook, and Oracle's new Beehive collaboration suite. It was a snoozer of a demo, to quote Michael Feldstein "it was like the inverse of a magic trick, instead of making something trivial look miraculous, it made something heretofore remarkably difficult look incredibly easy."

If you know how the trick works, it isn't magic, but that's the point, isn't it? A "friction free" environment, based on common definitions, that makes all of this stuff work. But the reality is, what Linda Feng of Oracle and the rest of the LIS team was able to show was a very quiet revolution. It:

1. Showed the power, value and yet unmet potential of the standard. This will be fundamental to encouraging and ensuring actual adoption by the industry, especially when there are supposed members of the community and our partners who continue to tell customers that the standard is not baked or implementable.
2. Demonstrated that Oracle's implementation of LIS, the SAIP, is making great strides in solving the key integration challenges. Not only did it demonstrably provision multiple systems, but performed this integration at a granular (ie. class section) level. In a world where faculty and students must have multiple kinds of technologies at their disposal to satisfy the learning experience, the power of interoperability really begins to emerge.

And what we really like about the IMS approach is that LIS is fully compatible with a family of standards (namely Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability - LTI) that create a path from administrative systems to a large variety of teaching and learning systems.

For us at Oracle, this is still really just the beginning. As the LIS Alliance expands the scope of enterprise objects and functions supported in the specification, we are also working to innovate the implementation via middleware (ie. service bus).

We are now at a point in our industry where we can collectively focus more on the challenges of students, faculty and administrators rather than on the former/current challenges of numerous point-to-point proprietary integrations. We applaud the commitment of our direct competitors named above who are participating and that of our partners like Pearson, Unicon, MoodleRooms, Inigral and the Sakai Project.

It is attitude turned into action that will drive these innovations, and the trend to action appears to have arrived. Anybody else want to get on board?

^In brief, the rest of the history: LIS definition was completed in 2008 with a broad number of industry participants. Oracle adopted it and delivered the first implementation of LIS in a product called Student Administration Integration Pack (SAIP) in August 2008 using Sakai as reference architecture (thanks to Unicon for helping on the Sakai side of the equation!)