By Rob Abel, Marwin Britto, Patrick Masson, and John Johnston
The growing emergence of digital devices, learning platforms, and applications promises easier access to a variety of content, increased productivity, and the realization of personalized learning environments. Unfortunately, it is a major challenge to use these rapidly emerging resources productively to meet students' diverse and increasingly demanding learning needs.
How can higher education institutions bridge the gap from today's reality to realizing the potential of digital education? Technology providers need a firm integration strategy, ideally based on open standards, in an age of cloud-based commercial applications that make "going digital" a matter of plug-and-play. Just as the web was enabled by a set of open standards published and maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), open standards from IMS Global Learning Consortium can enable greater innovation in education.
At the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative 2013 annual meeting, we participated on a panel to share our strategies for integrating third-party applications into our enterprise learning platforms to accelerate the development of effective and efficient personalized learning environments on our campuses. The following is a recap of our discussion.
Integrating the Long Tail
Launched in 2001, UMassOnline supports 119 online degree and certificate programs on 5 separate campuses within the University of Massachusetts system and another 10 private and public institutions throughout the state. In 2012, UMassOnline supported nearly 55,000 UMass enrollments, with an average 15.4 percent growth rate over the previous five years.
To better understand how much teaching and learning was occurring outside the learning management system (LMS), administrators in 2011 analyzed more than 40,000 online courses offered over the previous three-year period. The results of their analysis showed faculty and students routinely extended the LMS platform by integrating remote Internet-based resources. Within UMassOnline's 40,000 course sections were more than 420,000 links, to almost 20,000 external, third-party tools and services.
These findings highlighted that there is no way the pace of innovation or development of a single organization maintaining an LMS ― open source or commercial ― can keep up with all the activity that is happening across the Internet. Faculty are discovering niche tools relevant to their disciplines and simply linking to them in their online courses. Students, as well, are extending the classroom beyond the LMS. For example, students may create their own wikis outside the LMS and link to it within a discussion forum in order to collaborate on course projects. Whether it's a mortgage calculator for a business school or a weather service from the U.S. Government, all of these resources are developing much faster, much more broadly on the Internet, and what faculty and students want to do is access those in the context of their courses.
When we plotted out and graphed the tools being used, the trend reflected what Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson described as the Long Tail. About five percent of the tools were being used by large numbers of people and the remaining majority by many less. There are far more tools that somebody is using than those that everybody's using.
Traditional thinking was that the organization developing an LMS would provide all the interfaces required to integrate with third-party tools. The reality is, integrating those tools into an LMS is increasingly the responsibility of the institutions themselves ― and, unfortunately too often, the end-user.
Three words describe today's IT infrastructure: remote, distributed, and decentralized. Remote refers to off-site hosting and cloud-based applications. Distributed describes development undertaken by multiple self-interested groups as independent or collaborative efforts. While decentralized recognizes governance and decision-making is not controlled by a single authority, nor is adoption, which is independent and informal.
At UMassOnline, we believe integration and interoperability with remote, distributed, and decentralized resources is an essential service needed to enable online education, just like hosting or any other fundamental service supporting the LMS. The reality is, a significant portion of teaching and learning is occurring through third-party tools outside of the LMS. Indeed, because of this growing demand, UMassOnline has invested in hiring staff and reorganizing operations to support service integration and extend our online learning platform to take advantage of third-party resources.
Of particular note is UMassOnline's product and portfolio management practices, which have been modified to enable the emergence of new tools on demand. As third-party resources are discovered by "end choosers" throughout the community, we map our service levels ― including integration needs ― to the pace of adoption: as interest grows so do our service levels. This process allows us to continuously introduce new tools while reducing risk associated with "full-production" implementations.
When considering new tools to integrate within the LMS, a critical factor is to first determine whether the product meets standards established by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, such as the Common Cartridge (CC) and Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standards, which are created by IMS members from both institutions and commercial vendors who establish learning specifications that ensure interoperability.
Creating a Blueprint for Interoperability
Located in the North Houston area of Texas, Lone Star College is a multi-campus community college system with six colleges, five campus centers, two university centers, and 11 K–12 school districts. The system serves students across 1,400 square miles in two counties, offering certificates and associate's degrees, and, through high school and university center partnerships, high school diplomas and bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees. The largest community college system in Houston, Texas, in 2012 Lone Star was named the fastest growing community college in the nation. In spring 2013, Lone Star College System had its highest enrollment ever, with more than 78,000 credit students and 90,000 total students. Of these students, more than 32,000 online students were enrolled in almost 2,000 online courses taught by 1,000 online faculty.
Lone Star College joined IMS in 2000. Since that time, to take advantage of the latest technological affordances for online teaching and learning, Lone Star has implemented several learning management systems. Through these implementations, Lone Star consistently faced the challenge of easily migrating content and third-party applications from one LMS to another. This was problematic because LMS providers often created proprietary formats limiting export/import capabilities.
In 2009, IMS formed the Enterprise Learning Systems and Applications Procurement group, with members representing K–12 institutions, higher education, and product/service providers. This group set out to create a template for baseline technical functions and features to support K–12 and higher education request for proposal (RFP, technical requirements) and procurement processes for learning management systems and associated applications with the understanding that the LMS market could benefit from a common template for procuring these systems. By 2011, after considerable collaboration and cooperation, an internal draft and then a public draft of this template was created. The 66-page document identifies the teaching and learning features, functionality, and usability aspects (i.e., communication tools, assessment tools) as well as the technical and administration aspects (i.e., implementation, integration, hardware requirements). This template was envisioned for use as a tool to procure LMS and applications that are provided as "bundled" or "unbundled" solutions, and it can be used in whole or in part depending on an institution's specific objectives for procurement.
Lone Star College utilized this template in 2012 as a starting point for our LMS RFP to adopt our next-generation online teaching and learning system. The template helped frame the discussion, illuminated areas of confusion, and offered insight to compatibility aspects of the LMS and third-party applications not previously considered. The template is designed to be customized to meet the institution's needs, so Lone Star quickly modified and personalized the template to its suiting. The end result was a good "insurance policy" for future LMS migrations; we anticipate the document and its adherence to IMS interoperability standards will make it much easier to export/import LMS content and data and ensure compatibility with third-party applications.
Seamless Learning through Integration
With an enrollment of more than 43,000 students, the University of Michigan offers a diversity of learning options. With support from the ITS Teaching & Learning Group, there are about 4,000 course sites created each term through the institution's Sakai-based LMS, which is called CTools. The group also provides the university with online assessment tools, online evaluation, and content management.
Michigan has a very purposeful strategy for integrating with third-party systems. One characteristic of that strategy is to provide a cohesive and coherent package of integrative services to support teaching and learning. We're not focused so much on the actual tools, but on supporting instructional workflows that result in student performance.
The university's strategy is to focus higher up on the value stack and closer to the needs of the end users. We want everything we do to result in a noticeable improvement and increased capabilities to our users. Integrating with third-party services provides new capabilities, it minimizes the operational burden, and it provides greater value to our users. This results in higher utility at a lower cost.
A key characteristic of our integration strategy at Michigan is to make sure all of the adopted third-party tools are properly aligned with institutional standards and policies. There are a lot of policies, security, legal, and service-level issues to consider. We want to make sure we are aligning with issues such as FERPA and HIPAA. Working with standards minimizes those risks.
Initially it is tempting and deceptively easy for faculty to start using a third-party service on their own. But those instructors soon face obstacles such as multiple login procedures, manually juggling student accounts, and having to maintain multiple gradebooks.
We try to work with faculty who are interested in being innovative in their teaching by using these services, by picking ones that we've either had an integration with already or ones that support learning integration standards. Sometimes, we'll get a call right out of the blue from a vendor that has the latest, greatest thing. Early on in the discussion, we often find ourselves asking what learning standards does the vendor conform to, or have they adopted the IMS LTI standard in their product. Having systems that conform to those standards really lowers the implementation cost and barriers to utilizing them.
Michigan occasionally encounters vendors whose products are not aligned with standards, and the conversation sparks development of integrating the LTI standard. Examples of that collaboration are FolioTek, an e-portfolio provider, and Piazza, an online discussion board provider. We make the pitch to show them the return on that work. If it's easier for their customers to integrate with their system, then that provides an open door for them to work within those institutional infrastructures.
A recent big win for the IMS LTI standard was integration with class rosters. In the past, students would have to establish separate accounts for third-party systems. Now, a third-party system can pull out the course roster information from the university's LMS and automatically provision all the accounts. The integration removes a huge management burden for the instructor.
Michigan has created a request form for third-party integration that streamlines the process. The form includes such questions as: Has the vendor made reasonable attempts to be 508 accessibility compliant? Are they are charging for their services? Are they are collecting any student data that might put them in violation of FERPA? Having the vendor complete the checklist makes it easier for them to work with their other customers, because they can say they have gone through IMS performance testing. And it makes the job easier for us at Michigan, because we're not re-creating the wheel with every third-party vendor that we interact with on our campus.
Institutions of all types that are looking to integrate third-party tools with their LMS should not be afraid to ask the vendor to conform to the standards. In a lot of cases, they recognize the opportunity to expand their customer base by lowering the barriers to adoption. IT and academic leaders should not be afraid to ask vendors to do some work to integrate with the institutions’ system. It will make the vendors’ system much more valuable to end users, and it is going to make it easier for the institution to maintain.
Improve Adoption of Digital Learning
As decisions on which applications to use in the learning process continue to transform students and faculty from being "users" to becoming "choosers," IT departments are feeling increasing pressure to establish standards that allow for the seamless migration of content. This trend is what the IMS Global member community calls the "Open Innovation Revolution" to enable institutions to experience as much as a hundred times improvement in the adoption of digital learning tools. With the pressure institutions are feeling today to improve efficiency, we expect this adoption of interoperability standards to grow exponentially.
© Rob Abel, Marwin Britto, John Johnston, and Patrick Masson. The text of this EDUCAUSE Review Online article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.