I am happy to announce today that Sakai’s master branch has minimum viable product (MVP) for all of the aspects of IMS LTI Advantage.  

We have this code in our code base before the specs are completed and before certification tests are available for LTI Advantage.  Because of the specs and certifications are not available/final, we cannot claim compliance to the specs at this time (October 2018) – all I am announcing at this time is that we have an initial, complete implementation that we will move into certification.

Sakai (and Tsugi) will help IMS test their certifications and reference implementations as they are rolled out and I expect we wil be certified as soon as the certifications are available.

http://www.imsglobal.org/lti-advantage-overview

In short LTI Advantage includes an OAuth 2.0 / JWT security model for launches and services, a names and roles service, and the ability for a tool to make create and manage their own grade book columns.

The LTI Advantage code is already included in Sakai-19.   Any issues identified during certification and interoperability testing with other vendors will be fixed using our normal fix-merge-and-minor-release process – so we will be able to field a 100% certified LTI Advantage implementation in Sakai-19 once IMS finalizes the specs and provides the certifications.

I am excited.   My feeling is the LTI Advantage will be as revolutionary as the initial LTI 1.1 was nearly a decade ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akDUM1SXMxE

All the other major LMS systems in the market are making good progress towards LTI Advantage by the end of the year and Sakai will have LTI advantage in the same timeframe as the rest of the market.

This will be a great development for Sakai – since the Advantage APIs cover such a broad scope and all major vendors will be implementing the full range of the APIs, it means that far richer LTI tools can be built without using proprietary LMS-specific extensions.   Other LMS vendors will push tools towards LTI 1.3 / Advantage by making it so that switching to LTI 1.3 is the only way to get access to certain capabilities.

Technical Details

If you are interested in the nerdy details of what it took to make it happen, you can look at the Sakai issue tracker:

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

The short summary is that while it took me four months to build LTI Advantage for Sakai, the new code is simpler and cleaner than the LTI 1.1 code and far simpler than the LTI 2.0 support in Sakai. As a comparison, I worked on LTI 2.0 in Sakai off and on for three years before it was completed.

Acknowledgements

It is important that I acknowledge the help, support and guidance by the other participants in the LTI Advantage process.   They know much more about this spec than I do and I was able to lean on them as I raced through my implementation and for that I am very thankful.

Thanks to: Claude Vervort / Cengage, Nathan Mills / Canvas, Karl Lloyd / Canvas, Eric Preston / Blackboard, Derek Haskins / IMS, James Risler / IMS, Martin Leonord / TurnItIn, Paul Gray / Learning Objects, and many others.

Making LTI Advantage work on a tight time schedule required an unprecedented trust and sharing of code and best practices between participants.

We knew we were all going to succeed together or fail separately and the the effort was large but also important and transformational.  I for one know I could never have done this without the help I received from the rest of the working group.   So my heartfelt thanks is in order.

Open Apereo 2019 will take place at the Omni Los Angeles Hotel at California Plaza ( http://bit.ly/OpenApereo2019Hotel ) between Sunday June 2nd and Thursday June 6th 2019. Hold those dates!

Open Apereo has a growing reputation as a great conference for learning and networking around open source in education. What makes it great are the volunteers from the Apereo community that bring their priorities and vision into the planning process, ably supported by our outstanding conference planners, Concentra.

If you would like to participate in the planning of the conference, please contact Ian Dolphin of the Apereo Foundation (https://www.apereo.org/content/contact-and-mail-lists).

Sakai Virtual Conference 2018
Sakai – Enabling Educators and Engaging Learners
November 7, 2018 – Online
http://virtconf.apereo.org/   #SakaiVC18

Register now! Registration is open for the Sakai Virtual Conference. Registration is $50 per person, or $500 for group/institution registration, with all proceeds going toward Sakai feature development.

The Sakai Virtual Conference will take place entirely online on Wednesday, November 7, 2018.  You’ll attend presentations in virtual meeting rooms, ask the presenters live questions, participate in interactive activities and contests, and get the conference experience without the expense of travel. The “conference location” will be in Sakai, and we will be using Sakai tools to facilitate interaction among attendees. If you are comfortable in Sakai, you will easily engage in this virtual experience.

Find out how your peers are using Sakai at their institutions! Learn about new features in the upcoming release! Presentations will focus on effective teaching and learning practices, online pedagogy, and engaging students using technology.

The Sakai Virtual Conference is a unique opportunity to network with your peers and share stories and best practices in an online venue.

Register today and stay tuned for publication of the full program!

I am pleased to announce Coursera F2F Office Hours on the first day of my first trip to India to speak at PyCon India.  Friday October 5, 5:30-6:30 Hyderabad Convention Center Room 2.03.

HICC Complex (Near HITEC City)
P.O Bag 1101, Cyberabad Post Office
Hyderabad – 500 081

http://www.hicc.com/

http://www.hicc.com/floor_plan/HICC-Second-Floor.pdf

There is no charge to attend office hours and you do not have to register for Pycon India to come to office hours.   It is a separate pre-conference event that the Pycon India organizers helped me arrange (thanks Ram and Subash).

Even though this is my first trip to India, my second trip will be coming shorty.  I will be having office hours in Bangalore and Mumbai in December when I come over to speak at IIT TechFest.  Like in Hyderabad, my Coursera office hours events will be free and separate from the conference.

Here is a map view of all my (70) office hour videos since 2012 with my most recent office hours video in the center of the map. You can click on the pins to see the videos.

http://www.dr-chuck.com/office/