Linking research & learning technologies through standards

The IMS Global quarterly meeting for late 2009 was hosted by Oracle at their Redwood City campus in California. During the meeting, Oracle and their partners gave a nice demonstration of systems integration using the emerging Learning Information Services specification.

About the LIS specification

The IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification supports

sharing of learner and course information between Student Information Systems and Learning Environments

It supersedes the previous IMS specification in this space (IMS Enterprise) that specified data formats for exchanging learning information between systems. LIS takes things a step further: as well as specifying data formats, it defines services for exchanging and synchronising student and course information between systems. This represents a new direction for IMS specifications: a shift toward a service oriented approach (soa) rather than a data oriented approach to system integration.

The LIS specification is large. It defines hundreds of operations in six services for managing updates to data about people, groups, memberships, courses, outcomes. It also has a bulk data exchange service that supports bulk provisioning of information between systems. Most of the services are defined using an IMS profile of the WS-I suite of specifications (WSDL, SOAP). There are also an LDAP binding for some of the services, and talk of REST-ful bindings in future versions.

An implementation of the specification is not required to support each and every service. Neither is an implementation required to support each and every operation. Rather, it is expected that communities will define profiles of the specification and implement those.

The demonstration

The demonstration itself involved an implementation of a higher education profile of the LIS specification. In the demonstration, Oracle used its Campus Solutions to manage information about students, course offerings, classes, grades etc in a mythical college. The product was essentially used as “single source of truth” for student and course information. During the demonstration, Oracle showed how:

LIS demonstration

• An update to student and course information within Campus Solutions was synchronised with the Sakai learning environment.
• Timetabling information was pushed from Campus Solutions to a facebook application, which students could embed on their own facebook page. This is an interesting recognition that student information should be available where students hang out, not just in the official student portal. It also shows how both enterprise learning environments and personal learning environments can be supported by LIS.
• Group membership information was pushed from Campus Solutions to Oracle’s Beehive collaboration environment, so classmates could collaborate on particular topics.
• Selected updates within Sakai could be synchronised back to Campus Solutions (e.g. outcomes information from Sakai pushed back to CampusSolutions). This showed that LIS isn’t just a “push” solution: the learning environments could update as well access information in Campus Solutions.

Why is this interesting?

Why is this interesting, I hear you ask? Well, it demonstrates some of the advantages of service oriented approaches to system integration. According to Oracle, this sort of integration would take upwards of 6 person months using traditional methods (presumably time spent agreeing on common data formats and protocols and doing code/database level integration ). The move to service oriented integration allowed them to get the basic functionality for the demonstration up and running in a couple of days and fully functional in a couple of weeks!

The IMS community involved in LIS also see the potential for loose coupling of systems that a service oriented approach provides. There is talk that future demonstrations might show how it is possible to replace one system with another that supports the same functionality and interface. In the scenario shown above, it might involve replacing Beehive with another collaboration system.

Finally, this represents another early step in the higher education learning community’s journey toward standardising a service oriented approach to sharing learner information. It is interesting that the effort lags a few years behind the K-12 learning community’s SIF suite of specifications for K-12 learner information services. I’ll discuss how the LIS and SIF approaches compare in another post.

It remains to be seen whether others can replicate Oracle’s success with using LIS to improve the speed and effectiveness of systems integration, but others are certainly jumping on the implementation bandwagon. Check out Michael Feldstein’s IMS Learning Information Services: The State of the Union blog post for a snapshot of current activity.

Update (Jan 2010): IMS now has a Learning Information Services Interoperability Demo Video