This Fall, I will be coming to India twice to give talks.  I will be attending these conferences and giving talks:

PyCon India October 6-7, Hyderabad

https://in.pycon.org/2018/

IIT Techfest, December 14-16, Mumbai

https://techfest.org/

I will also be visiting Microsoft in Bangalore on the December trip to give a talk.

So I would like to arrange office hours in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mumbai as part of these trips.   In order to help me make arrangements (reserving venues, etc), if you might be able to attend the office hours, please fill out the Google form:

https://goo.gl/forms/wncHE3TR8WSfXGGu2

Once I make arrangements with exact dates and times I will send another announcement to the class.

I a very excited as this will be the first time I have ever been to India :)   So I hope to have a chance to meet as many of you as I can on these trips.’

I have been making good progress towards LTI Advantage in Sakai – the following have initial implementations and are in Master:

– LTI 1.3 Core

– LTI 1.3 Basic Outcomes

– LTI 1.3 Lineitem

– LTI 1.3 Names and Roles (with a Groups extension available)

The specs are still somewhat in flux so as we clean up bits here and there the code will evolve but the major work is in place.  

Like I have mentioned before,  I have a nice set of utility routines in to handle OAuth 2.0, Access Tokens, Java Web Tokens, and PKI message signing.  The speed at which I can roll out new web services using the LTI 1.3 security model is pretty amazing.   I adapted the old Sakai memberships extension to become LTI 1.3 Names and Roles with the OAuth 2.0 security model in less than two days because of the nice OAuth 2.0 infrastructure I have built.

As Sakai evolves, so does Tsugi.  I use Tsugi to test all the Sakai LTI 1.3 implementations.  I have built an LTI 1.3 test harness in Tsugi that exercises the LTI 1.3 APIs:

https://github.com/tsugicontrib/lmstest

I will get this into production on one of my Tsugi servers so when I write LTI 1.3 QA documentation we will have a ready made server to work with.

You can track activity this by watching the JIRAs connected to this JIRA:

https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-40533

Up next for LTI Advantage:

– LTI 1.3 ContentItem – Should be < 1 week

– LTI 1.3 Assignments and Grades – ???

The Assignments and Grades is the most intricate spec so I will leave its implementation as my last task.

These are two abstracts I wrote for the Sakai Virtual Conference (https://virtconf.apereo.org/) on November 7, 2018. This is a great conference – it has a good number of tracks and is virtual so it can be attended by people around the world at very low cost.

OAuth 2.0, Public / Private Keys, and LTI 1.3, Oh My!

This session will cover the basic technologies that underlie IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) version 1.3 that makes use of OAuth 2.0, Public/Private Keys, and Java Web Tokens.  This session is about the technologies and there will be another session that will cover how LTI 1.3 is built into and works within Sakai 19.

Looking at LTI 1.3 in Sakai-19

This session will cover the end-user and administrator user interface for the support for LTI 1.3 in Sakai-19.   This session will not cover the implementation details and underlying technologies used to implement LTI 1.3 – that will be a separate session.

There are quite a few schools that are switching to new LMS systems.  Often, thinking about a “Next Generation LMS” becomes “What will be our Next LMS?”  If we are to find out way to the NGDLE, we will need a strategy that works with any LMS and can work even when a school is in transition from one LMS to another. The Tsugi Tool framework provides a way to build and integrate innovative tools into any of the LMS systems in the market.  We will report on active outreach efforts to bring Tsugi to the Canvas and Blackboard communities.

In the first part of the session, we will quickly present the Tsugi product, give a simple demonstration of its capabilities, and report on outreach activities to various LMS communities.  Then we will do a series of hands on demos with Google Classroom, Canvas, and Moodle.   After the demos, we will have a group discussion to react to and make suggestions as to whether this approach is has potential and what might be the barriers to success.

Attendees will be aware of how tools can be integrated seamlessly and easily into a wide range of Learning Management Systems using IMS Learning Tools Interoperability and Deep Linking.   Attendees will see a “Portable Educational App Store” integrated into multiple LMS’s in action.

We will have a number of audience participation activities including using Google Classroom, Moodle and other LMS systems.   We will have a coordinated discussion about the veracity of this approach.

Dr. Severance is a founder of the Sakai project and is the lead developer / architect for the Tsugi project.   He also was instrumental in the creation of the IMS LTI and Common Cartridge standards.  He has well over a decade of experience working on and integrating tools into LMS systems.

Tsugi strives to lower the barrier to entry for those who might build learning applications.

Here is this week’s update from the crew chief of the SakaiCar:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/AsvhH8ENHr1x7kYA6