This is my abstract for my JA-Sig talk
The current crop of Learning Management Systems are focused very much on meeting the needs of the institution in providing a basic, uniform technology platform for teaching and learning. However, faculty and students are often familiar with setting up accounts, joining various types of sites and adding themselves and friends to those sites, and figuring out new systems by trial and error. The next generation of Virtual Learning Environments needs to allow this type of organic “mash-up” and make it simple enough to place in the hands of the end users of these systems. In a sense Virtual Learning Environments need to adopt approaches like Facebook, iGoogle and YouTube for learning application integration. IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 is a standard under development which addresses this functionality mash-up use case. This presentation will talk about issues and approaches for building the next generation of Virtual Learning Environments.

Long Version as Originally submitted ——
The current crop of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) is focused very much on meeting the needs of the institution in providing a basic, common technology platform for teaching and learning. While the creators of VLEs (indeed including Sakai) are interested in bringing the best possible technology to bear on teaching and learning, generally their first priority is to meet the needs of the enterprise in terms of identity integration, auto-population of courses, ease of institutional technology support, automatic grade processing, and similar issues that impact the enterprise