I have been kind of heads-down busy since mid-September working on preparing Sakai’s LTI for the Sakai-22 code freeze and release and implementing a number of pre-emergent IMS specifications in both Sakai and Tsugi.

The IMS LTI Working group is doing great work (it is worth joining if you are an IMS member). There are a number of un-released specifications that are pretty awesome. These specs are pretty mature and just kind of stuck waiting to be released. But that has not stopped LMS’s and tools from implementing them and using them. These are three of the really nice new specs:

• Auto Provisioning – This eliminates all cut and paste of security values to get an LTI Advantage Security configuration set up on the tool and the LMS. This spec is implemented in Moodle, Sakai, and D2L as well as Tsugi and Cengage – so this is pretty mature. This has been in Sakai and Tsugi for some time now.
• Submission review – This adds features where the tool can inform the LMS of the “state” of a grade through the web service call. It can indicate is the tool has received an assignment, if it is in draft mode, if it is partially graded, etc. It also adds a special launch where the LMS grader / grade book can launch right into the detail of a particular student in a tool. So if the student takes a quiz and the quiz tool can show a teacher the answers for each student, the teacher can use the grader in the LMS and launch directly into the tool’s student tail for the correct student. Canvas’s speed grader has a feature like this but it is non-standard. This new spec makes it so a tool can do it using only official IMS standards – which encourages the other LMS’s and eventually Canvas to all do it the same way. The first 100% standard implementation o the spec is in Sakai and I have added support to Tsugi on the tool side. This puts me in a great position to help other tools and LMS’s do this in an interoperable way. And to do some awesome demos :)
• Privacy Launch – This is part of an IMS effort to address important privacy issues. This spec is more of a start since (unlike Tsugi) most LTI tool vendors have spent exactly *ZERO SECONDS* thinking about data retention and learner privacy. Most tools will receive this launch and just put up a page like “call tech support”. This has kept the scope of this new feature kind of small – so it is more of a starting point. But Tsugi has been thinking deeply about privacy and retention for its inception and I have built a new feature in the LMS settings that lets key owners expire PII data for their users and in the future allow even finer grain control of the data that belongs to their users. And I added a feature in Sakai to do the privacy launch from the admin user for a tool – so Sakai and Tsugi are the very first implementations in this space. Again this enables leadership in interoperability and makes for awesome demos :)

So all this stuff is in the current master branch of Tsugi and Sakai. If my presentation is accepted I will be giving a talk at Sakai’s Fall online conference about all this stuff. If you don’t see it there – I can re-do the talk for a Tsugi audience later.

Also I will be at Educause the Week of October 25 with a Sakai trade show booth (Sakai’s first booth ever) – so if you are coming to Educause make sure to stop by the booth.