The concept of a Learning Management System is nearly 20 years old. For the most part, modern-day Learning Management Systems are simply well-developed versions of those first learning systems developed at universities and commercialized through companies like Blackboard, WebCT, and Angel. Since the early LMS systems were developed for a single organization and developed as a single application, it was natural for them to keep adding more functionality to that single application. Each vendor added proprietary formal expansion points to their LMS systems like Building Blocks and PowerLinks. The concept of a single expansion point across multiple LMS systems was proposed by the Sakai project in 2004. The idea evolved over the next few years to become the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability Specification (LTI) released in 2010. LTI provided a basic expansion point across the whole LMS marketplace. LTI greatly expanded the number of applications that could be integrated into an LMS – but those integrations were naturally limited because of the simplicity of the early versions of LTI. In this talk we will look at the standards activities over the past six years that have been laying the groundwork to move from simple plug-in integrations to an open multi-vendor learning ecosystem where the LMS is just one part of that ecosystem. Many are now calling the concept of the new structure of a broad and interoperable market for educational software as the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE). We will look at the work that has been done and an outline of what is left to do to deliver an open learning ecosystem.