This is an abstract I prepared for the 2012 Blackboard Developer Conference – BbDevCon. We shall see if it gets accepted.
IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.0 now has very broad market adoption and has been in Blackboard since Release 9.1SP4. Blackboard has added LTI support to building blocks, making it very simple to add LTI to a building block. Developers can plug externally hosted learning tools into Blackboard and the rest of the marketplace with a few lines of PHP. Now that the low-level LTI “plumbing” is in place, what will we do with it. This talk looks at the tools that are available in the marketplace that support IMS LTI and show them plugged into Blackboard. We will introduce and describe IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.1 that includes support for returning grades from external tools back to the grade book and demonstrate this. This talk also looks at ways to quickly build and host tools that function as LTI Providers and plug those tools into Blackboard. This talk also looks at the next release of IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 that includes even simpler provisioning and installation of tools, expanded grade/outcome services, and improved ability to import and export classes with links to dynamic content and services hosted on the web.