Fresh on the heels of working with Marc Ritter of Wimba, I spent this week in Vancouver working with the developers of SiteMaker (www.gvcsitemaker.com) to do an initial integration of SiteMaker into Sakai using a prototype version of IMS LTI 2.0. Jonathan presented this approach in his SiteMaker talk at the the Newport Beach.
Chuck Hill of GVC did a great job on the SiteMaker side. We produced a really simple user interface that mimics YouTube’s approach – “cut and paste this bit” to make this as simple as possible. The user never has to touch any XML. Jonathan Maybaum of UM deserves the credit for the clever UI design – he always tries to think about things from the user perspective and he wanted it as simple as possible.
We also implemented the shared secret security with message signing with SHA hashing. We spent some time thinking about how to improve the security further.
The code modifications to SiteMaker really support all of the UI including needed persistence and the code is complete and checked into the trunk of SiteMaker.
Here are some screenshots of the SIteMaker Configuration Screens
SiteMaker Access Configuration
SiteMaker Configuring Remote Participant Access
I ended up building a new Sakai JSR-168 portlet that is unique to LTI-2.0 to make it much cleaner and simpler than LTI 1.0 – this new portlet is now in SVN here:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/sakai-portlets/trunk/
Here are some Sakai screenshots:
Sakai Configuration Screen
Sakai Launching SiteMaker using LTI in the frame set portal
There is more work to be done and the LTI specification is still being developed so this code will need to evolve over time – but this much progress is a testimate as to how much simpler Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 is when compared to IMS Tools Interoperability 1.0.