Khan Academy running in Sakai and Blackboard using IMS Basic LTI
Update 2012: Google changes the levels of resources available in the free tier so this application can no longer run in the free tier :(. You can download a copy of what I was running at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/software/khan/ – no guarantees of course – but it is a copy of what was working when I made the video.
This is a purely demonstration project after a few hours of hacking. I made a copy of the Khan Academy Exercise software and put it up on Google App Engine. I then modified it to accept IMS Basic LTI launches and auto-provision accounts and auto-connect Learners to Instructors as coaches. So the need to make a separate Khan Academy account for each student to select a coach is eliminated.
Khan Academy running in Sakai and Blackbooard using IMS Basic LTI from Charles Severance on Vimeo.
With Basic LTI in place, all is automatic based on the course roster in the LMS. Further, the accounts are fully name spaced by Consumer Key so information is nicely siloed for each course. I apologize the the roughness of this, I started yesterday and tried to see how far I could get. Thanks to the internal elegance of the Khan code and the fact that they had done some nice refactoring to support Facebook and IMS BLTI is similar to FaceBook, the modifications turned out to be pretty easy.
I demonstrate Khan academy plugged into Sakai and Blackboard’s free CourseSites system. Of course this would also work equally on any of the IMS Certified LMS systems like Desire2Learn, Moodle, Jenzabar, OLAT, etc.
This should not be considered production but after a few days, I can give out keys to folks who want to do simple demos with this instance. In the long term, I would love to see Khan Academy support BLTI on their servers and merge a cleaned-up version of this code into their source tree.
I would like to demonstrate this to some of our learning and teaching staff at Sheffield when you consider it ready.
Thanks.
Paul
Paul – It is nearly ready – I just need to remove that debug screen. I will try to do that today.
Paul – I just updated it – go to https://khan-blti.appspot.com/ to get instructions on getting/using a key.
I have sent all this to Khan Academy and they are open to the idea – just very busy right now – so I will host a copy for now – feel free to use it. If it gets interest, it will increase the likelihood that Kahn Academy will find time to do BLTI.
Hi Chuck,
Great to connect at StartupWeekend in SF. We’ve been running a Khan Academy experiment this summer with two groups of students randomly assigned to either a traditional teacher lead Algebra class or a Khan Academy based class with the same teacher. We are doing pre and post tests to measure gains, and working with the Stanford d school to document the learning. Google donated new Chromebooks for the project so we are also piloting how their technology changes the experience for students. We are blogging all of our learning at http://www.blendmylearning.com
Hi Chuck,
Thanks for the work you’ve done on this – i was about to try something else that would have taken a lot longer! :-)
Is the source code for your ‘version’ of khan available? What did you need to modify to all for BLTI functions? What detail is returned by Khan to Moodle for each student?
I’m trying to setup a system for some rural schools in Malaysia and we are keen to have them use Khan as part of the project – but we want to introduce other SCORM modules and other courses to match Malaysia curriculum. We are still exploring the possibilities and your work here is proof of concept for us.
BTW, we are keenly following the blendmylearning experience.
Cheers,
David.
David – You are welcome to the source code of my hacks. Send me E-Mail. The problem is that I took a snapshot of their code and have not updated it. So it is really just a prototype – it would work but keeping up with Khan’s latest fixes would be a bit of effort.
David – Here are my patches. The ZIP of the whole thing is like 131MB.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/misc/2011/khanacademy-stable-patches.txt
David – that is a great idea and would be easy to do – since this is a fork of the code – I was not planning on doing anything other than demo stuff – would you use the feature if I added it?
Thanks Charles. Much appreciated. Since my earlier post my laptop and all my Khan development was stolen so it has taken me some time to get things back together! Thank God for TimeMachine!!!