Daily Archives: June 10, 2014

TSUGI – An Standards-Based Learning Tool Framework

Over the next few weeks I will be writing some blog posts about my new approach to teaching and learning technology. You can see a few of my recent talks about my ideas on SlideShare.

The overall goal of the TSUGI framework is to make it as simple as possible to write IMS Learning Tools Interoperability™ (LTI)™ tools supporting LTI 1.x (and soon 2.x) and put them into production. The framework hides all the detail of the IMS standards behind an API. The use of this framework does not automatically imply any type of IMS certification. Tools and products that use this framework must still go through the formal certification process through IMS (www.imsglobal.org).

My overall goal is to create a learning ecosystem that spans all the LMS systems including Sakai, Moodle, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Canvas, Coursera, EdX, NovoEd, and perhaps even Google Classroom. It is time to move away from the one-off LTI implementations and move towards a shared hosting container for learning tools. With the emergence of IMS standards for Analytics, Grade book, Roster, App Store, and a myriad of other services, we cannot afford to do independent implementations for each of these standards. TSUGI hopes to provide one sharable implementation of all of these standards as they are developed, completed, and approved.

In the long run I expect to develop Java, Ruby, and other variants of TSUGI but I am initially focusing on the PHP version because it allows me to be most agile as we explore architecture choices and engages the widest range of software developers.

In the long run, I hope to make this a formal open source project, but for now it is just my own “Dr. Chuck Labs” effort.
Even in its current form it is very reliable and very scalable but I am not eager to have too many adoptions because I expect the code will see several refactor phases as various communities start to look critically at the code.

If you want to watch this evolve see www.tsugi.org

Learning Tools Interoperability™ (LTI™) is a trademark of IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. (www.imsglobal.org)