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