2019 Learning Impact Leadership Institute

While basic data about tool usage is often available directly from the technology supplier, there are significant differences in the type and volume of data made available, the format in which the data is presented, the way certain data is defined, and the costs involved in obtaining the data. Analyzing this variety of data is time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with inconsistency. And today, when student privacy and data security is a top priority, institutions must demonstrate the proper handling and management of PII.  The new LTI Insights project from IMS Global Learning Consortium utilizes a common approach for retrieving data from each learning product, thus providing the institution a more consistent set of data from which to make decisions.

James Rissler is the IMS staff who is responsible for the technical development of the LTI Advantage specification and providing implementation support. During this session, James will explain how the LTI Advantage and Caliber Analytics specifications are used together to provide analytics dashboards. He will also demonstrate a reference implementation that can be used as the basis for creating you own analytics tools.

The IMS Security Framework defines the security approaches that should be used when implementing IMS specifications.  The security framework, published recently, is already being used in the LTI Advantage, OneRoster, and other IMS specifications.  IMS is establishing a new Security Framework Group, composed of experts in security and the EdTech domain within the IMS Member.  This Group will monitor and review how the Security Framework is used within the various IMS specifications.  They will also undertaken an annual security audit of how security is addressed within the IMS specifications. During this session, the IMS Chief Architect will give an overview of the features in the Security Framework, and will explain how different IMS specifications make use of the framework and the certification implications. He will also describe the role of the new Security Framework Group and explain the benefits to the creation and adoption of IMS specifications.

Over the past 20 years IMS has published an extensive set of specifications to enable interoperability for education technology.  IMS only create a specification when there is no other alternative to adopt and adapt. Even when creating an IMS specification, there are many situations when these make use of specifications and standards developed by other organizations.  IMS makes extensive use of work from other specifications and standards publishing organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF), the International Standards Organization (ISO), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), etc. We use this work to provide for encoding the data formats e.g. XML and JSON, to provide computer readable descriptions e.g. WSDL and OpenAPI, to enable the underlying communications exchange e.g. HTTP and TCP.  We also use work that complements our own edtech interoperability such as IEEE LOM, Schema.Org, CEDS, etc.

During this session, the IMS Chief Architect will explain how IMS has made use of other specifications and international standards. He will also identify the other specifications and standards that will be adopted by IMS over the next 12 months. We take a pragmatic approach to specification development and leverage as much external specifications, standard and best practice as possible. Awareness of this other work is essential when adopting IMS specifications. This is an excellent opportunity to understand how the IMS specification suite builds upon other specifications and standards.

IMS has a growing set of service-based specifications e.g. OneRoster, Competency and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE), etc. Service specifications describe both how the data is to be represented and how it is exchanged between systems/apps. IMS use a technology called OpenAPI when creating a specification that uses REST-based data exchange with JSON payloads.  OpenAPI is a specification being developed and supported by the OpenAPI Initiative under the Linux Foundation. We use OpenAPI because it simplifies, considerably, rapid prototyping and early adoption of our service specifications.

Andy Miller, a Technical Architect at IMS, will explain why IMS use OpenAPI, how we make use of OpenAPI and how we document our use of OpenAPI. He will also demonstrate the use of the Swagger Toolkit which is an open source solution for working with OpenAPI. This is an excellent opportunity to understand how IMS’s use of OpenAPI makes it easy to implement our service-oriented specifications.