OSCELOT Open Source Day 7.0

OSCELOT in New Orleans

OSCELOT's annual Open Source Day event is a free-form mini-conference. It brings together a community of champions for the development of open-source tools that expand, integrate, and enhance learning tools in education. Some of the major themes being discussed at OSD7 today include the Bboogle project that integrates Google Apps and Blackboard, grade exchange between the learning environment and the SIS, reporting (using the BIRT tool), and the IMS Basic LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standard.

LTI is especially important – as it may be one of the more misunderstood (and powerful) technologies available for extending the online learning environment. It is used by publishers and vendors as a simple way to plug content into a course, but has been underused by schools to plug their own external technology and resources into courses. The more that institutions are able to make use of LTI, the more they will be able to participate in and shape the development of this powerful and cross-platform technology. The nature of LTI allows it to bypass many of the administrative layers of a learning management system (most major LMS systems support LTI), and run in the specific area where it is needed – without impacting the rest of the system.

There is not a huge barrier to getting a basic start with LTI, a quick google search for LTI code snippets can provide some basic examples – also be sure to check out the Celtic Project as a great resource. To really realize the power of LTI, though, it is important to study the basic LTI specification to understand what it can really do and how to best architect your solution. It is also important to understand that an LTI tool is a multi-tenant application that could be installed in many different courses or roles on different LMS platforms. To really take advantage of the power of LTI, it is important to have a good understanding of how it can be best used.

You will find lots of support in the OSCELOT community, and look for sessions at DevCon12 and BbWorld12.