Tag Archives: Common Cartridge

A Blackboard Standards Update

To follow up on Ray Henderson’s blog post earlier today

I’ve been at the IMS Quarterly Meeting in Lone Star College in the Woodlands, Texas this week. My Blackboard colleagues and I have been showing off our progress on IMS Standards. We are finishing testing of two technologies in our Blackboard Learn product: IMS Common Cartridge and Basic LTI. We’ve taken our integration of Common Cartridge and Basic LTI into the Bb Learn core and included support for BLTI links inside a Common Cartridge Package. I’m also pleased that we will include both Import and Export of Common Cartridge within the core platform. This will do a lot for learning object repositories and sharing.

The Blackboard approach to Basic LTI actually extends Building Blocks technology in a powerful new way. We’ve made it possible to define a BLTI link within the bb-manifest.xml file which means that Basic LTI links can be used within a number of workflows in the application. As far as I know we are the only vendor to allow these more complex link placement options. We also make it possible for administrators to define trusted tool providers and enable course builders to create links to these providers as easily as one would put in a URL. Finally since we’ve integrated Common Cartridge and Basic LTI a CC package that included BasicLTI links can be used to define placement of tools within the flow of course materials. For example one could build a module which ended with a link to a simulation after providing some local training activities.

Blackboard is also making progress on Shibboleth. We’ve joined the InCommon Federation and hope to setup Blackboard as an identity provider. We are working with a handful of customers to work through a few key use cases involving SAML user provisioning and synchronization and sharing courses between institutions.

I’m not going to go into too much detail on our new SCORM partnership, but I think we’ll see that our player improves dramatically as we move to the RUSTICI player.

Finally I know that system admins and managers want to see better integration between the Blackboard Learn and other campus systems. The administrative systems need to work better. I’ve been on the LIS working group now for several years within IMS and so I’m happy to report a couple of items. First the working group has finally finished key elements of the core profile. We’ve worked to refine and simplify the API so that it will meet the needs of integrating administrative and vle systems in both real time and batch scenarios. This newly simplified profile was the last hurdle preventing us from completing our implementation. We’ve been working closely with SunGard in the last few months and I’m optimistic we will have something to show at the next IMS meeting in January. Now we’re still a bit of a way from shipping LIS. The workgroup still has some issues to work out in the Outcomes (grade exchange) profile and with authentication. The timeline for the LIS workgroup is that the workgroup will be doing testing of all profiles but outcomes by the end of January, and then plan to publish and finalize the grade exchange and hopefully be done with the specification by Learning Impact. I’m cautiously optimistic that we will meet these timelines. There is a lot of work left though within the workgroup. In addition to authentication and grade exchange there is a set of fairly complex certification tests which we(the workgroup and IMS) will need to complete, test and review. Still it seems like as an industry 2011 will be the year that IMS LIS is finally ready.

Some Thoughts On Standards and Vendors

mfeldstein has an interesting post up on his site about how to judge a vendor’s support for standards. I’m going to weigh in with my personal views and then provide some comments on his article. The usual disclaimers apply here that these are my personal thoughts and not those of any employer or group I work with /for around etc. Though others are free to chime in agreement or disagree.

Personal Soapbox
I want to start by articulating my personal view as a participant in the standards community. I’m a member of the IMS Technology Advisory Board and a contributor to the IMS Learning Information Systems (LIS) working group. I also represent my company on the Common Cartridge Alliance Program Management Group (CCAPMG). I’ve done quite a bit of work on the bulk data exchange service for LIS. I also work with the SIF association and ADL collab from time to time. I’ve invested my professional and personal time in helping to evangelize for education technology standards. I’ve recently joined the OpenSocial working group and am working with some folks in the community to create a profile of OpenSocial focused on educational data.

It is my personal mission to use standards to create what I call the edutech commons. This would be a set of common code libraries usable by Virtual Learning Environments, Student Information Systems, Learning Tools and Learning Networks which would allow easy integration. In the same way that BSD’s libraries for TCP/IP have become the defacto implementation used by most operating systems, I would like the code that connects up technology in .edu to be easily plugable into many implementations. The whole point of object oriented coding was that we should be able to create consumable objects that wrap business processes and share them across projects.

We’ve actually seem some great progress in this front on the Basic LTI project. Thanks to hard work of folks like Dr Chuck, Stephen Vickers and others we now have a pretty good set of basic LTI libraries out there in the field.

Another great example of this is the Shindig project for OpenSocial. With Shindig any vendor can implement the opensocial framework by creating service provider interfaces (SPI’s) to map their data and classes to the open social API. Because Shindig creates a common service layer, code can be more easily moved between OpenSocial implementations.

The alternative world is one of lots of clean box implementations. We end up in the world of JavaScript, SCORM and other “standards” which have many quirks from implementation to implementation. The lack of a code library in the commons results in multiple interpretations and levels of compliance and this makes interoperability more difficult.

A second concept that is important to me personally is the notion of data transfer. It is my personal view that data should be written to the system once and then be able to move with limited restrictions throughout the network. I want data creators to be able to move easily through the network with lower transfer costs by data consumers. It frustrates me that so much government information is not packaged in a way that it is easily portable. Consider the very necessary work of various companies who compile state education standards and resell the resulting databases. They must parse through different formats, word documents, pdfs and sometimes type written documents without an electronic equivalent other than a TIFF file to compile the information into a computer consumable database. Imagine if instead there was a semantic markup for educational standards. State governments could establish a mechanism for publishing standards in a way that these items could be easily parsed. I love the UK Government Data program’s ambition to make all government documents published with semantic markup and meta-data on a central site.

A Personal Reaction to the article on e-Literate

Knowing my personal biases, let me apply some comments to the proposed rubric for vendors and standards. Michael starts by discussing drivers for standards including the notion that

Standards tend to reduce the total amount of money that customers spend on integration, which generally means that somebody is going to make less money.

I strongly disagree with this. Integration is low value consulting in my view. It is not strategic and does nothing to deepen your relationship with your customer. Customers generally have a limited budget for services with a vendor and if you use it up on integration you aren’t talking about how they can more strategically deploy your product and providing them with customizations that better adapt the software to their business. Furthermore by raising the costs connecting the software to other business operations you pull yourself out of the networks that create the next generation of value. My goal is to create standards that are easily consumable and implement the highest value functionality in a common format maximizing portability. I’m hopeful that LIS won’t launch a new wave of expensive products for customers to buy but will instead add capabilities to existing products and lower maintenance and development costs for customers and creators.

Conformance Profiles
Michael writes that is is important to understand how a vendor conforms to the standard. He writes about how conformance profiles are useful in assessing how the features of the standard are implemented by the vendor. I think this whole experience is a sucky one and I loathe it. Most people never read the conformance profiles and fewer still actually understand them. I’ve been on many calls with developers working to understand specific nuances of a conformance profile on top of the already complex standard document. I’ve also worked with consultants in the field trying to parse a 200+ page spec document to figure out if the problem was a bug, conformance issue or just some misunderstanding of the spec. I just want the integrations to work. As a coder I don’t want to spend time analyzing hundreds of different vendors conformance documents to figure out how company “a” implements the person id. As a technology buyer I don’t want to have to know the ins and outs of every standard implemented in the products I use. For enterprise integration I just want to read a list of sections and populate my database and give you back some grades at the end of the semester. I want SOA that works, not some crazy new way to do EDI that requires another peice of expensive middle ware just to make systems exchange data. In my dream world to point system A at System B and generally have them talk to each other with minimal fuss because they both implement a standard. Just like I can call your phone # and have it make its way through the network across hardware from Cisco, Lucent, Alcatel, and Motorola until I hear your voice on the other end of the line. As a phone company customer I didn’t have to review the variances between the CMDA data network vs the WiMax protocols to make the phone call happen. I’m very happy that basicLTI has gotten to this point. It seems like Chuck sends me an email every week saying test out this new thing we integrated with BasicLTI and we enter in our shared secrets and register the tool and it just works.
To walk back my rant a bit, there are lots of reasons standards describe capabilities that are not used or differently implemented by vendors. I’ll also give Oracle some credit for getting a product out there that folks could look at so at least there is some baseline for implementers to look at. I also highlight that there are technologies that can be used to auto-negotiate based on a mutual level of conformance and capability based on a automated profile A good example of this is in OpenSocial where you can query an OpenSocial container for its features. This lets you write code to handle the case where a container doesn’t have a feature. I hope we can see something like this in IMS standards eventually.

Conformance Testing
Good conformance tests make your life easy, but too often conformance tests don’t mirror the real world implementations. Conformance tests can also drive standards implementation and adoption if done correctly. The best example of this is the ACID3 test for HTML. This test has had a profound impact on getting browser vendors to improve their compliance with HTML standards and performance. At the same time many standards come out with very low threshold conformance tests. The result becomes a bunch of people with the certification logo, but no customers successfully going production with the “standard”. IMS has been getting much better at building conformance tests in the last couple of years.

Testing with other vendors
Michael argues that testing against other vendors is key. I will extend this by saying that the standard needs to be judged with multiple providers and consumers connecting. A single vendor can put a lot of energy into lining up a bunch of partners to create proprietary one offs, but this doesn’t mean conformance. A measure of a standard and vendor is can you swap out the component on either side and still have it work. For example in the BasicLTI world we’ve been able to hook up Blackboard, Moodle, D2L, Sakai, Olat and other VLE’s on one side and multiple learning tools like Wimba, Learning Objects, etc on the other side. This shows a highly flexible and solid implementation. I’m excited to see SunGard moving into the LIS world as this will create multiple providers to test against.

Reflecting on Learning Impact 20Ten

I just got home from the 20Ten Learning Impact Conference in Long Beach California. This was a great conference and I had a great time talking with so many leaders in the industry.

A few quick notes:

-Open Educational Repositories — Dr. Charles Reed, Chancellor of the CSU system gave an amusing keynote on Open Educational Repositories. Members of the CSU digital marketplace team were present in force. Dr Reed described the success of the Merlot Project, and challenged publishers with the statement, “Algebra II hasn’t changed enough to justify $120 / text book.”

-IMS GLC is becoming a cornerstone of the educational standards world. The presence of for profit educational institutions, military (a stronghold of SCORM), K-12 (including some large virtual schools like Florida Virtual Schools), international (IMS Korea and JISC in the UK), government policy makers from the US department of Ed, publishers and vendors from around the world gives credibility to the IMS as the broadest organization in the currently overly fragmented world of education technology standards.

-A trend to lighter more implementable standards. I spoke with many TAB (technical advisory members) and IMS staff, and I believe there is now consensus towards simplified specification development focused on implementations over use case volume. The Basic LTI/Common Cartridge approach has gained acceptance as superior to past approached. This model of lightweight standards focused on primary use cases that can be rapidly adopted by industry is winning over the past model of elaborating every possible use case and writing 400 page spec documents. One of my frustrations in many years in educational technology standards has been to see a number of “standards” emerge which become so complicated that every vendor creates a unique profile. The result of so many profiles is that customers lose interoperability, which was the goal of standards in the first place. This new approach is winning over the membership. At the LTAC meeting on Thursday we saw demonstrations of BasicLTI and Common Cartridge from most major vendors, I’m happy that Blackboard was one of them.

Edufountain: Week 3 Kickoff Mashups, More Standards, and an Interview

My original plan this week was to be at the Developer Happiness Days meeting organized by JISC in the UK. This conference is centering on Libraries, Mashups and all kinds of cool things. Unfortunately I came down with a rather nasty virus this weekend and so I’m not able to fly for a few days. I will hope to capture things from afar if possible.

This week I will still be blogging and talking with folks about mashups, semantic web and content discovery. Mashups and semantic web standards like RDF are enabling web pages to move from simple static human readable information stores to rich reusable computer accessible databases. Dr. Michael Wesch did a great job summarizing this concept in his video The Machine is Us/ing Us:

What better way to kick off the discussion with more comments on common cartridge and emerging standards. If we want to create a robust web 2.0 future then we need to have standards that allows information to connect and move. To that end I’ve gotten more interview questions back from Jeff Kahn, head of Verbena Consulting and long time contributor to standards like Common Cartridge, and OKI OSID repository. He is now a retained consultant of the IMS GLC. Jeff also has helped Soft Chalk® build some of their innovative Blackboard Building Blocks® and content development tools. Finally as an open source contributor he worked with Mark O’Neil and others at OSCELOT to develop the very cool OSID Federated Repository Search Building Block.

As always with these interviews Jeff is writing as a representative of himself and not any affiliated organization such as IMS, OSCELOT or others

Tell us about yourself and background in Education Technology / Other Technology Standards?

I have been involved in the application of computers in business, policy, and education problems for about 25 years. My career started in the U.S. foreign assistance sector, transferring microcomputer technology to the energy planning sector of other countries. Since then, I have worked in a range of software development and technology professional services firms. Since 2002, my focus has been on standards for computer application interoperability in higher education, with a sub-speciality in repositories and search. In late 2009, I became a retained consultant to the IMS Global Learning Consortium, focusing in the Common Cartridge standard.

Talk to us about one standard (LIS, Common cartridge, LTI) that you have been involved in and explain its importance in the future of education.

I am a resource the IMS Global Learning Consortium makes available to its members. My concentration is in advancing the Common Cartridge standard. Common Cartridge distills lessons learned and best practices in how media files, links to content, assessments, and discussion content can be organized, described, and packaged for exchange among tools and learning platforms. Common Cartridge, as its name implies, is important because it holds the promise of allowing content providers and consumers a single, common, format with which to package material for exchange. Without Common Cartridge or something similar, providers and consumers are faced with the prospect of having to make many special-purpose exchanges — a more costly and less efficient approach.

What are three things every Institution leader should know about this standard?

Common Cartridge relates to the promise of authoring content once, exchanging it everywhere.

Common Cartridge is already being supported or on the near-term technology roadmap of a critical mass of LMS providers and commercial content publishers.

Common Cartridge is an incremental adjustment to or extension of current practice and is neither complicated or expensive to embrace nor disruptive to deploy.

What are three things every Instructor / instructional designer should know about this standard?

Common Cartridge provides a way to package multiple media files, links, and assessment that make up a lesson’s or course’s content.

Common Cartridges is silent with regard to content presentation and runtime behavior.

Packaging material in the Common Cartridge format should permit the content to be imported in all the major learning management systems.

What other standards (IMS and others) do you see as making an impact on education technology and the Internet over the next 3 years?

Digital textbooks are replacing traditional printed formats at an accelerating rate and digital may be the dominant format soon. The number and variety of end-user devices for displaying digital books is also increasing rapidly. Initially, devices focused on reproducing printed text on a display, but more and more, collaborative and other value-added applications are emerging to change how content is consumed. This will influence the role and use of this kind of content in teaching and learning.

Content also is starting to be being delivered in pieces, a la carte, rather than as a whole text. This mimics the disaggregation we have seen in moving from the record album to the separately purchasable track. A single packaging format for digital books or chapters, with or without digital rights management, is likely to emerge among the current options and such standardization will accelerate adoption and lower costs of production and barriers to entry.

What lessons have you learned from the standards development process which should be used by future standards groups / initiatives?

In general, a bottom-up approach to standards development, where the specifics emerge out of common and best practice, is more likely to succeed than a standard created in the abstract or in anticipation of a need. Standards take a long time to catch on and require strong advocates. The value of a particular standard, its business and technical merits, need to be readily apparent and easy to explain. Standards are easier to adopt if they come with implementation aids such as sample code or reference implementations. Until the market leader(s) embrace a standard, adoption will be slow and require those promoting the specification to convince parties to adopt it.

EduTech Standards: An Interview with Mark Stiles

Picture of Mark StilesMark Stiles, Professor of Technology Supported Learning and Head of Learning Development and Innovation at Staffordshire University in the UK, was kind enough to respond to my email interview questions. He requests that I note: that these are his personal responses and should NOT be seen as representing the official views of either Staffordshire University, JISC or IMS.

Please give the group and introduction about yourself and background in Education Technology Standards?

A bit about myself – originally I was trained as a Computer Scientist (I have a UK Degree in Computing that dares back to 1971!) and I also have a record of being a teacher and academic manager in UK Further Education. Some 20 or so years OK I moved into the UK Higher Education sector as a Deputy IT Director with responsibility for developing the use of IT in support of learning and teaching. In the mid 90′s, I developed (using funding from JISC) one of the first VLEs (called COSE). Also around that time I became the person in charge of learning development and innovation at Staffordshire University. In 2000, I was awarded one of the first Professorial Chairs in “eLearning” in the UK.

I have carried out numerous projects on behalf of JISC ranging from the original development of COSE, through work on interoperability standards (eg early work on IMS Enterprise and Content Packaging specifications), work on content reuse and repurposing, technology for the support of work-based learning etc. I’m currently running a project looking at transforming the management and sustainability of innovation across my University using Enterprise Architecture approaches, and another project piloting Open Educational Resources. (I should add we use Blackboard as our VLE and Guiti Harvest Road Hive as our learning content repository – our SIS is Oracle-based).

Can you tell us about the role JISC is taking in developing global technology standards?

I’m Deputy Chair of the JISC Learning and Teaching Committee, Chair of JISC CETIS, and a Director (on behalf of JISC) of the IMS GLC.

JISC’s role in standards would be best found from the JISC strategy document on its website, but JISC is solidly behind the development and use of open standards, and sees standards as a critical factor for enabling both effectiveness and efficiency for the UK Higher Education sector. JISC works with a range of international organisations with either interests or activities in the standards area. JISC CETIS is the organsation which focusses education technology work in the UK for JISC and employs a number of staff who support JISC funded work across the country and beyond.

What lessons have you learned from the standards development process which should be used by future standards groups / initiatives?


I see standards in terms of enabling Universities to meet the challenges of a changing global environment. Clearly standards which enable reuse/repurposing and open exposure of learning content are vital, as are those which enable the sharing of content, learner information, and other data across partner institutions. The market for HE is Europe is increasingly demand led and standards which will support employer engagement, the management of work-based learning, and the efficient creation of new product (including negotitiated and highly personalised courses – both in terms of organisation and delivery)will be critical. The harmonisation of wider “de facto” standards from the Web 2.0 and widget world with more specifically educational standards work will also be critical as will accomodating the whole “bring your own tools” philosophy and accomodating these developments within an institutional and partnership corporate environment.

Standards work needs to be inclusive and as open as possible – it needs to involve as many vendors and the communities concerned as possible – from both development and consumption perspectives – and MUST be truly international.

Edufountain Standards Week: Blog Roundup

Education technology standards got some much needed positive news this week with the IMS Quarterly in Orlando Florida. Nearly ever major VLE vendor demonstrated a commitment to BasicLTI with code available. Learning Objects demonstrated the power of this by showing their tool connected in as BasicLTI consumer. I was really really frustrated to be snowbound in DC while so much cool stuff was being demonstrated. I’ve spent most of the week on conference calls listening in though and collected some of the comments on the Education Blogosphere (post your own links, or reactions below):

Here is a roundup of some blogposts

Rob Abel, CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium posted a strong argument for standards on this blog

There is absolutely no doubt that lack of community-driven standards is reducing new innovation in education, and also limiting the usefulness of innovations that have been developed. Standards, if not too constricting, and adopted organically (rather than being forced through government regulation), can form a platform for “distributed innovation.” This is what IMS is achieving now with the Digital Learning Services (DLS) standards you reference above.

Ray Henderson, President of Blackboard Learn writes of progress

Why does all of this matter? Because publishers, institutions, instructional designers, and faculty are all in the business of creating richer learning content for students. And as they create ever richer collections of content integrated with applications, it’s only natural that they’d like to share these creations. There are simply too many barriers to their doing so in today’s model. And while they’ll not solve every problem of portability, Common Cartridge and LTI are a potent force in eliminating the largest problems. I’m pleased with the progress we’re making as an industry, and even more pleased that Blackboard is fulfilling the promise of making meaningful contributions to this momentum.

David Gray notes how this will impact instructors

One thing this should mean for faculty is that, when trying to get content from your publisher rep, it should be far more difficult for the rep to provide you with the wrong stuff. It also means that, should you teach at multiple institutions using different systems, you’ll have a good chance of using just one content source that can be imported into your courses at each institution. This is what, in the tech support business, we refer to as “A Good Thing”.

Sheila MacNeill of JISC CETIS talks about how BasicLTI will shape the future of Learning Systems She also speculates on how this will impact the freedom of content and the enabling of distributed learning environments. (An upcoming JISC meeting looks very interesting)

Via Dr. Chuck I got some screenshots of BasicLTI in action. Also here are some shots of common cartridge in action against Wookie a W3C Gadgets server under development from the Apache foundation.

Blackboard & BasicLTI

Basic LTI Demo with Bb and Wookie intergation via Nabble


D2L with BasicLTI

BasicLTI interface to W3C Wookie on D2L



(The Bb and WebCT one look the same, so I’ll space a second screenshot. I don’t have a shot of Moodle but I understand it also is working.

EduFountain: Standards Week Kickoff

I was hoping to be at the IMS Quarterly Meeting in Orlando Florida, but a pair of storms have forced me to stay in DC and connect via the Wimba conferencing bridges. I’ve emailed some of the folks I was hoping to interview for the seminar and I hope they will chime back with some updates for us over the next couple of weeks.

Today I had some communications issues but managed to connect up with the LIS group and we discussed the reaction to the public draft of IMS LIS v2.0. This spec is a replacement for the old IMS Enterprise 1.0 spec which has seen wide adoption. The goal of this specification is to make it easy to integrate administrative data into instructional systems such as connecting an SIS to a VLE.

LIS is one of three standards the IMS is focused on publishing this year. The other two are Common Cartridge (CC) and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI). Together these three specifications make up the Digital Learning Services infrastructure. Together these three standards will enable:

1) LIS — Movement of Course, User, Membership and Grade information between Systems
2) LTI — Wiring Tools Together into Unified Learning Experiences
3) Common Cartridge — Sharing Digital Content Packages

My personal view is that LTI is the most impactful of these three standards. It has the capability to be as meaningful as the anchor (<A>) tag and HTTP for HTML. Every link you see on a webpage depends on that one tag and a simple HTTP request from your browser. For all the utility of tables, bulleted lists, javascript and all that came after the anchor tag really enabled the web revolution. It made it easy to loosely join documents within and across websites. It made it easy to create servers, and start to put things online. The network effect took hold and the web exploded from these simple things.
LTI has the same capability for the VLE/CMS. The ability for learning tools to simply establish a trust relationship and exchange user credentials and grade information will be potentially very revolutionary. Imagine a world where a small library of code can be bolted into any existing application and instantly that tool can be connected to any VLE/CMS, or even into an individual Personal Learning Environment (PLE).

Other standards to think about:
IMS is just one of many standards organizations. There are a lot of other standards out there that have an impact on educational delivery via the Internet. A few to think about and discuss (definitions are mine, feel free to debate):


  • SCORM — A packaging format for sequential learning activities and computer based training activities that can plug into any LMS.
  • SIF — A K-12 focused data exchange framework.
  • Others? (add your own suggestions below)

And now 3 questions for seminar participants:
1) Pick one standard and explain its impact on your role in the institution. Perhaps you are a system administrator needing to connect your administrative system to the CMS via IMS Enterprise or LIS, or maybe you are an instructor seeking interoperable content through SCORM or Common Cartridge. Explain your choice of standard and explain how it impacts you today and how it should evolve.

2) After reading the background on these educational technology standards or based on personal experience what is your perception of these standards? What is your experience with existing educational technology standards (positive or negative), how do you see these evolving over time? Share your frustrations or successes with these standards.

3) Do standards really matter from an innovation/market perspective and should they lead an industry? A positive example might be the development of the original DVD specification, a negative example might be the iPhone SDK which exists in its own language (Cocoa) pushed through the closed app store.