| Completion
Date: October 2005 |
|
Summary
The IMS Tools Interoperability project demonstrates how web services can be used
to achieve interoperability between a Learning Management System (LMS) and
an external learning tool. The idea is for a completely separate tool to be
launched, allowing the user to perform some activity and the results of that
activity to come back to the LMSes gradebook.
The IMS TI will allow for tools such as assessment engine for tests
or Engage’s own ConceptTutor to work with an existing LMS (learning
management system). The key technology is Web Services, which
allows the tool and the LMS to be “loosely coupled”.
This effort is the first attempt by IMS to define a technical standard
and as such the first phase will result in a Guideline that is considered
a “proof-of-concept”.
The project’s proof-of-concept will be demonstrated at the
2005 Alt-i-lab (http://www.imsglobal.org/altilab)
conference in Sheffield, England in June 2005. UW Madison is
contributing the biochemistry course content, a special server edition
of ConceptTutor, and a Moodle LMS for this demonstration. By
late fall 2005, a Guidelines document will be issued by the work
group.
In this project, UW-Madison joins WebCT, Blackboard, Sun Microsystems,
SAKAI, , QuestionMark, the SAKAI Project, and staff from Stanford,
UC Berkeley, MIT, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan.
Technical
The special server edition of ConceptTutor has several interesting
features.
- ConceptTutors are stored in a modified version of the open source
Fedora repository.
- To promote accessibility and to demonstrate the use of IMS ACCLIP
and ACCMD standards for accessibility, we have modified Fedora
to implement an RDF binding of ACCLIP and ACCMD. A student’s
accessibility preferences are matched to the accessibility characteristics
of the content at the time of the request. Thus, a visually
impaired student will receive content tuned to her needs when she
requests a ConceptTutor without having to know how to request the
specially tuned content.
- The web services and content delivery components of the server
are built on open source foundations from Apache, including Tomcat,
Axis and WSS4J.
