IMS Alliances are for the purpose of ensuring interoperability in practice and keeping implementing organizations current on the evolution of a specific set of IMS standards. Alliances were established at the request of the IMS members. The IMS members wanted support to make reliable interoperability a reality and wanted to avoid the need for every implementing organization to reinvest in the tools, processes, and interactions to integrate with every platform. In the Alliance IMS provides this support at a fraction of the cost and, most importantly, steps in on an ongoing basis to resolve issues that arise.
Under the Alliances, IMS provides extensive support to implement conformant products. When testing is completed, IMS issues a conformance mark that IMS stands behind. What this means is that IMS will get involved directly in any issues that arise and work across organizations to resolve.
Joining in the Alliance and working through the process in the only way to achieve official IMS conformance. Conformance seals are only issued to and maintained with current IMS Alliance, Affiliate and Contributing Members. IMS does this in order to deliver on interoperability in practice on an ongoing basis. This benefits large and small organizations alike in creating and maintaining a vital, innovative, and open marketplace for educational technology products!
The Information Architecture for Learning
The aim of the Learning Information Services (LIS) specification is to enable learning application interoperability. The key objectives are to enable the management and manipulation of:
Overview of Learning Information Services
Benefits of membership
The Learning Information Services Alliance hosts the conformance program and provides support for implementing the LIS standard. Members have access to a variety of tools, presentations and sample files to help them utilize the specification.
A series of webinars throughout the year address various aspects of the standard and face-to-face Testfests provide opportunity for ad-hoc testing and demonstration of new implementations. Members of the Alliance also have access to the drafts of the latest version of the standard, well in advance of its public release.
Learning Information Services Alliance Activities
The Learning Information Services Alliance has been created as a high value community for product and service developers wanting to be compliant with LIS. The Alliance delivers selected services to the public, but further services are available to subscribed participants with the annual subscription fee varying according to size and nature of the organization.
In addition to notices issued by IMS Global Learning Consortium (e.g. press releases or the IMS monthly Dispatch), the Alliance exploits four communication channels:
1.LIS Alliance website: this has a public area offering access to the specification as well as introductory information on LIS. The participants area provides access to a wide range of LIS tools.
2. Testfest: These events are co-located with the IMS quarterly meetings and the annual Learning Impact conference. Testfests are often open to the public, offering an opportunity for newcomers to get a taste of the Alliance activities and meet other participants. The meetings provide a platform for demonstrating new implementations of LIS, conducting ad-hoc interoperability testing and discussing common issues.
3. LIS News Update: An occasional publication distributed to Contributing Members, Affiliate Members, Alliance participants and the IMS Community, offering news on events, new tools available and adoption activities.
4. LIS Alliance Forum: a discussion forum available to support Alliance participants in adopting LIS, sharing of adapters to popular applications, and tracking conformance status and issues - an invaluable resource for developers and institutions adopting LIS.
Benefits of Learnng Information Services Alliance Membership
Join the LIS Alliance
Join the Learning Information Services Alliance and begin taking advantage of the benefits described above. Sign up now online.
Learning Information Services Alliance Website
Already a LIS Alliance member? Sign in to the LIS Alliance website, to access all of the LIS resources.
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