The IMS Tools Interoperability v1.0 Guidelines had a limited scope and aimed at achieving a simple connection between the LMS and a tool. LTI v2.0 will extend the original guidelines to address Tool Configuration, Tool Presentation, accessibility issues, and access to LMS data such as calendar, grade book and content.

Participants

The Current Situation
At alt-i-lab 2005, a demonstration of the Tools Interoperability Guidelines successfully showed that a variety of tools and applications could interact and interoperate within different learning environments. Using web services interactions, TI allows an LMS to use resources from an external tool and receive, in return, simple outcomes from the tool.

This work seeks to further the capabilities of the TI Guidelines and allow for more sophisticated interactions between tool and learning or course management systems.

The Rationale
Wide support of TI amongst tool providers and LMS vendors will also have the following benefits in terms of costs, support, and security:

• Reduce development costs for Tool Providers to develop custom integrations with many LMS.
• Reduce support costs for universities, LMS vendors and Tool Providers coming from a more clearly defined interface between the LMS and the Tool: it will be less risky that a new version of a LMS or a Tool breaks an integration for example.
• Protect the LMS from poorly written proprietary tool integrations: with TI, the Tool features are exposed through the descriptor and no code is running on the LMS.

The Impact

• Lower cost and faster time to market to make one tool interoperate with many CMS/VLE.
• Easier and safer deployment model.
• Best practices.
• Enables development of a learning tool marketplace: more tools and more easily accessible.

Further Information
For information on IMS GLC and the benefits of being a Contributing Member, please contact:

Rob Abel
Chief Executive Officer
IMS Global Learning Consortium
rabel@imsglobal.org