Daily Archives: January 26, 2018

Abstract: Learning Management Systems, Educational App Stores, Repositories, and Analytics – An Ecosystem Approach

The idea of a “Next Generation Digital Learning Environment” (NGDLE) is now several years old and while the commercial products seem to be happy with the status quo of a monolithic LMS with mostly-proprietary integrations, the Apereo open source communities are adopting this new model across the board.  Apereo is showing the path to the NGDLE by moving from a single LMS product (Sakai) to a situation where educational needs can be met from any number of open source projects like Tsugi, Equella, Open Learning Warehouse, Xerte, and others.  Much like Sakai’s “interoperability first” approach in 2004 radically changed the educational technology marketplace, Apereo’s NGDLE efforts in 2018 are laying the groundwork that will dramatically transform the educational technology market for the next decade.  The exciting part of this effort is that there are already production-ready open source projects that allow us to explore the next generation ecosystem in action to begin the process to move toward a truly next generation experience in educational technology.

Submitted to: JaSakai 2018

Implementing a Standards Compliant Educational App Store with Tsugi (Educause)

Interoperability standards have matured enough to enable the creation of a standards based Application Store for Education that can be used in all the major LMS systems, MOOC platforms, and even Google Classroom.  An extensible application store is an important first step towards a Next Generation Digital Learning Ecosystem (NGDLE).

Keywords: NGDLE, Standards, Application Store, Interoperability

When you combine the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), Deep Linking (Content Item), and Common Cartridge standards and use them together in a coordinated fashion, you can build and Educational App Store that has smooth integration into the major LMS systems and MOOC platforms using IMS standards. Tsugi tools also can  integrate into Google Classroom.  Tsugi (www.tsugi.org) is a software framework that reduces the effort required to build IMS standards-compliant applications and integrate them into a learning ecosystem.  A number of open source Tsugi Tools are hosted and free to use at www.tsugicloud.org. This presentation will highlight how IMS standards can be used to deploy an educational app store and talk about how an App Store lays a foundation towards a Next Generation Digital Learning Ecosystem (NGDLE).

Participants will see a real, tangible element of the NGDLE.  Tsugi is the first standards-based Application Store for education. While not everyone will walk out and start using tsugicloud.org, the presentation will help us better understand what NGDLE will look like.

Participants will be given a usability exercise to perform on the www.tsugicloud.org site and we will gather feedback and report on the feedback several times during the presentation.

A hope of Tsugi is to simplify the building of educational tools to the point where faculty, students, and instructional designers can be part of building our educational technology infrastructure.

Chuck lead the development of the initial IMS LTI specification and is the lead developer of the Tsugi and TsugiCloud projects.  He also has a Tattoo that commemorates the major LMS systems that support LTI.

Chuck is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and uses a Tsugi App store to support his on campus classes in Canvas and support 100K students in his 10 Coursera courses and two specializations.

Submitted to: Educause 2018

Sakai Community Update 2018

This presentation will review the progress on Sakai in 2017-2018, covering the Sakai 11 and 12 releases and looking ahead towards the Sakai 13 release.  We will review new features in Sakai 12, report from SakaiCamp 2018, the Sakai Virtual Conference, and FARM Projects.  We will update attendees on accessibility, QA efforts, documentation efforts, standards compliance, and marketing efforts. We will talk about the future arc of Sakai and how we intend to move Sakai forward to be part of a Next Generation Learning Ecosystem. We will cover these and other aspects of the Sakai product and community in a fun and upbeat talk show format.

Submitted to: Open Apereo 2018

Abstract: Using a Tsugi App Store and Building Tsugi Tools (Workshop)

The Tsugi project is providing technology to enable a wide range of educational technology use cases. Tsugi was developed to simplify the development of educational tools and to allow those tools to be deployed in an “App Store” pattern using standards like IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (1.1 and 2.0), Common Cartridge, and Deep Linking (Content Item).   Tsugi tools can also be installed in Google Classroom courses.   There are a number of open source Tsugi tools that are part of the Apereo project and these are hosted at no charge at www.tsugicloud.org.   This workshop will walk through a Tsugi installation and configuration and walk through use cases with using Tsugi as both an application development environment, a Learning Object Repository, and an Application Store.  We will also do some UI/UX walkthroughs to improve the TsugiCloud user experience.  Knowing PHP and SQL would be helpful for the workshop but is not essential.

Submitted to: Open Apereo 2018

Abstract: Implementing a Standards Compliant Educational App Store with Tsugi

When you combine the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), Deep Linking (Content Item), and Common Cartridge standards and use them together in a coordinated fashion, you can build and Educational App Store that has smooth integration into the major LMS systems and MOOC platforms using IMS standards. Tsugi tools also can  integrate into Google Classroom.  Tsugi (www.tsugi.org) is a software framework that reduces the effort required to build IMS standards-compliant applications and integrate them into a learning ecosystem.  A number of open source Tsugi Tools are hosted and free to use at www.tsugicloud.org. This presentation will highlight how IMS standards can be used to deploy an educational app store and talk about how an App Store lays a foundation towards a Next Generation Digital Learning Ecosystem (NGDLE).

Submitted to: Open Apereo 2018