2012 is the year that Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) starts to hollow out the Learning Management System (LMS).

Last year—and flowing into this year—the groundwork and infrastructure has been laid that will bring about the death of the traditional, single point of entry LMS.  I believe that technology standard is something known as  (LTI).

What is LTI?

LTI works essentially the same way Twitter and Facebook do when authorizing other apps to share a login.  Using a standard called OAuth, FB and Twitter are able to generate a secure one-time login time of address that is only valid during the current connection.  In plain English, it’s a secure way of letting you login without creating an account.

LTI brings this same type of security standard to the LMS world.  Site builders can create trusted login relationships between the traditional LMS and toolsets outside the LMS.  This allows you to pass information about students and instructors (and other roles) between systems, creating a seamless experience for the end user. You can then pass someone multiple directions as needed.

LMS (e.g., Canvas) to LMS (e.g., Moodle or Sakai) and, more importantly in my mind, LMS to non-LMS.  Maybe you can understand the next heading when framed with the following context:

• All major LMS projects (proprietary included) are getting behind LTI;
• LTI is far less complicated to understand and implement than SCORM; and
• LTI can easily be implemented in non-LMS systems to bridge them with LMS systems

The Trojan Horse

LTI is how we finally escape the pit of singular system that has boxed up educational experiences for so long.  Why do you think faculty and students always end up utilizing ad-hoc methods to manage and communicate knowledge?  We provide them with tools for drop boxes, they use Flickr. We give them email, they want light-weight chat integration.  We give them forums to structure content, they use Google Docs.

LMSs and the scale they need to be built to, combined with the pace at which universities adopt new systems is a perfect storm scenario.  We constantly are behind the needs of our users, off-the-shelf and custom solutions never meet needs for long or fully satisfy audiences.  It’s not because the tools are poor, it’s because the structure is wrong.

LTI allows instructional designers, instructors, developers and management to think differently about the way they plan and implement learning systems.

A Structured Anarchy Future

Many of my ideas for my original Structured Anarchy post were borne from trends I noticed in the non-edu space with regard to technology; ideas that have turned into my obsession.  LTI/OAuth is the solution to a problem that the corporate/Web 2.0 crowd solved many years ago — pervasive logins across multiple websites / servers.

Students don’t want to have to learn multiple interfaces, yet Google seems to have over a dozen services strung across different addresses and different functions and are very successful.  Have you ever not used Google maps because the interface was strikingly different from Gmail? I realize I’m just pinging on Google, but Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft and many others are doing similar things.  

Ultimately, you need to make a focused Web service; do something REALLY well; create project teams to sustain development for it and then feed users to it; create a singular method of login; make the experience seamless or reduce it to a “click to connect to {XYZ};” and provide standard UX / UI elements.

Personal Learning Environments

A Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is the suite-of-tools approach to learning systems designed to minimize the LMS.  Look, we need an LMS/central system (at least until this gets wider implementation) —it’s just the role of that system needs to be far more minimalist.  

An instructor wants to create a blog for their course. Let’s provide them with the best tool possible. Name the LMS that handles blogging well, please. (while I don’t support using this) WordPress comes to mind for blogging.

An instructional designer wants to create an e-text that’s separate from the LMS because it’s mostly static content. Name the LMS that handles content really well. Hence the need for an Instructional Content Management System.

An instructor wants their students to have a conversation around video / audio assignments.  Name the LMS doing that well.  I’m told they are getting better at it but will they ever be youtube or a youtube clone?

Students want to collaborative work in teams and manage their project.  LMSs project group spaces and areas for document management, but do they come close to Google Docs, Basecamp, or Atrium?

Now, rubrics, gradebooks, email communication…I’ll leave these to the LMS.  Social interaction on the Internet is changing at light speed, while university and college infrastructure was built to house knowledge in a similar form for decades at a time.  It’s time for a change.  Universities and colleges need to transform or fade away.

An old adage is that college is an experience, and that many people are paying for that experience.  As that experience becomes increasingly more digital, let’s build systems that can help provide the best experiences possible.

If only there was a system positioning itself as part of the learning platform revolution…

Image from Development Seed

Features in Drupal are the key to the creation and sustainability of LARGE scale systems.  These platforms, like Open Atrium or ELMS, can almost take on a life of their own yet still, at their core, are Drupal.

Features allows developers to not only package code but package configuration.  Configuration, while still drastically easier to work with then code, is still difficult because of the high knowledge barrier Drupal has.

Feature Server and Kit allow for the creation of larger ecosystems to crop-up around platforms built on Features. Feature Server is a Drupal site that can allow other Drupal sites to ask it if they are up to date.  Whenever you download a module from Drupal.org your drupal module can tell you if its out of date or not.  Feature Server essentially allows you to run your own mini-drupal.org.

Visualization of a Drupal ecosystem

So what’s the big deal with that? Well, imagine if different universities across the globe setup their own feature servers.  You would start to get a picture of Drupal more like what you see on the right.  Instead of code being required to live on drupal.org, code can live and be upgradable (and ultimately sustainable) from sources external to drupal.org (like drupal.psu.edu).

Here’s the big “so what”: let’s take this concept one step further.  Let’s say we have a platform that makes it easier to assemble learning materials and interaction.  This empowers learning designers and instructor communities to (hopefully) build better materials and interactions.  Create better tools, dedicate more time to the resource generation and less time fighting the technology.  That platform will be built on Drupal Features and Feature server, if you can think of what it might be…

So we have sustainable code and configuration changes, but let’s not stop there.

We’ve already packaged code and configuration at a Drupal level, What’s the next thing to package then? Open Educational Resources.  OER has sputtered in recent years because of a lack of sustainability planning with great press but little “what’s in it for me” factor for faculty.  This is where ELMS and Features come in. ELMS could be packaged with a “Feature server”-like functionality for broadcasting what OER packages it has on it.

Again though, who cares? Oh, I forgot to mention that Features can package content too!  SO, if we map all of these concepts to OER, we now have a sustainable method of passing OER between not just institutions, but directly to distributed learners.

ELMS App Store Visual at a University

Build something like the Aquia Stack Installer for a one-click installation of ELMS on local machines and suddenly you have a completely distributed system of knowledge produces and consumers.  Producers could even broadcast from their local machine if they wanted that they are producing knowledge for consumption (like Kahn Academy).  Consumers could go to their favorite knowledge producers and download any OER materials they have to their local ELMS instances.

btopro's OER Hub

This will start to create an “App Store” model for OER content or for-pay content for that matter with limited alteration.  These ELMS Hubs could be thought of much in the same way you think of TV stations or major aggregator websites of today.  All they’re doing is being produced by an individual or group of individuals and you are choosing to consume their content (channels or blog posts or articles or whatever).  This way not only major university bodies could pull together a listing of their resources and share them with others, but individuals have a seat at the table as well.

I believe very much in Connectivism knowledge creation and I’d be curious to see what others thoughts are about this concept.  Drupal is no longer just some neat tool that you should look into for education, I fully believe this is a major component to saving it.  Hopefully when the next release of the platform comes out you’ll start to believe too.

• Any time you use a system that you know is open and it has Feature XYZ; you immediately get irritated if you can’t have that functionality without hacking it back out
• ELMS support and sustainability model is very decentralized (as it always will be)
• Most of the functionality of elms can be applicable to any Drupal site / system (and should be)
• I am treating ELMS as a consumer of Drupal, not the author of a new Drupal (huh?)

What am I referring to?  Here are the five modules released in the last week:

Reusable components

Too often ideas are written for a specific context and then point 1 is reached through hacking functionality back out and the cycle starts again.

• Drupalcon Szeged 2008
• Drupalcon Paris
• Drupalcon DC
• Drupal Camp PSU (internal to PSU faculty / staff / students) 120+ attendees

Sure, the hook and alter system are fantastic.  Sure it’s extendable and ultra flexible.  If you really know what you’re doing you can bend Drupal to your will without breaking a darn thing. But none of that would be important without the people who get up and drive the Drupal bus every day.

The people in the above photos are just a few of the thousands who have stood for DrupalCon and Drupal Camp photos over the last many years.  Every event I’ve gone to someone inevitably tries to get a group photo.  Partly I think because they can’t believe the sheer volume of people there, interested in learning about a web development platform.  Now it’s time to spread this community to the education world.

I started a discussion thread on groups.drupal.org recently that seems to have caught some fire and I hope continues to burn (see article Forming a Drupal in Higher Education Consortium).  Drupal already has a major foothold in many universities and colleges but I don’t know that people really understand the scale to which this has taken place.  A recently study by w3techs.com found that:

“Drupal is used by 27.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know and that use .edu as top level domain.” http://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-edu-/content_management

So how to best keep this momentum going?  I’ll be putting together a document soon and sharing it with the community about how I think we should be positioning Drupal in higher education. Here are a few of the main points so far:

• We have seen nation wide budget cuts and need to continue to innovate in the face of tight budgets, increasingly doing more with less
• Standardizing on Drupal and we can unite staff roles and technology stacks on the web under a common platform.  No other web platform could power websites, intranets, learning management systems, content management systems, knowledge bases, blogs, asset management systems.  Train your staff once, deploy against multiple web projects.
• Hang out in common IRC channels, unite social media presences under consistent hash tags, as well as form a website that can aggregate to all drupal.{myschool}.edu sites participating in the consortium.
• Create a list of best practices such as reasons to use certain modules and distributions as well as those recommended for use in education
• Pay knowledge forward, ultimately we’re all trying to serve the interests of faculty and students so let’s help advance things forward together

I’ll have a more complete document for my vision for what a Drupal in Higher Education Consortium would look like but these are my key thoughts at the moment.  You’ll notice most of them are structured around the people impacted by the world of today as opposed to “views is awesome and drupal is king”.

Drupal is much more then just technology much in the same way that I am much more then just a programmer.

To me, Drupal is an idea that aligns heavily with the fundamental mission of education — empowerment.

Some additional thoughts on this topic

I was accused of starting to build an LMS a couple years ago when we started talking about ELMS (pronounced elms like the tree not E {pause} LMS).  I say accused because many open source LMSers will tell you to use Moodle and that anything else is a replication of effort.  As a side note just to make sure its in writing: ELMS is not an LMS, if anything it’s closer to a LCMS — Learning Content management system but as there is no fine grain user tracking or grade book component it’s not a learning management system.  I’m writing this to give exposure to a larger movement that seems to be afoot to make drupal a LMS.

Now as I’ve found in the past, you don’t bad-mouth Moodle, especially not while sitting in a MoodleMoot presentation .  Trust me, I’m sure you’d get a lot of platform fan-boyism from me about Drupal if criticized too, everyone loves their own kids :p.  But here are the reasons I usually steer people to Drupal away from Moodle.

• Moodle is just an LMS
• Drupal can be anything

So let me get this straight.  You’re telling me that Drupal can be used for all these different systems?  And that we will hire Drupal people and train people in Drupal for all these different purposes and can share employee knowledge / skills across the different units of our university… except for the LMS?  That’s a special exception because of the size and scale and it just can’t be done.  We need specialized programming knowledge in order for that to be achieved.

Really? I think what we need is access to specialized end-user knowledge.  Based on some discussions and presentations floating around the web I think you’ll start to see some movement towards a Drupal LMS.

Some postings I’m referencing as my “evidence” that there is movement here:

• Learning management systems: action on the Drupal front
• AtriumED Discussion – Open Atrium version as an LMS – Most promising effort / movement so far
• 4 Open Source Drupal Applications for Higher Education
• Open Scholar home page – faculty focused but still shows movement in this area
• Drupal as LMS – others thoughts
• Drupal as an LMS — more thoughts from last year
• Drupal LMS Group
• Videola Video Training Distribution platform
• Schoology — A Drupal LMS, not open but still a Drupal LMS!

Ultimately I think various Drupal LMS platforms will start to emerge or at least good recipes for people to follow in building their own.  A few reasons as to why since I don’t need to go over them endlessly:

• Drupal’s community is huge
• Wide variety of Drupal themes
• Tons of Drupal usage in higher education
• Drupal is NOT educationally focused, so solutions are tailored to solve big architectural problems of the web (= lots of devs) and then viewed through the lens of an educator, modules can be selected and developed
• Quiz, Gradebook, Content Outline Designer modules already exist and I’m sure others will start to pop up

It’s a typical institutional reaction to large problems — buy into a large system and hope the problem goes away.  Organizational change is always harder to talk about from a political perspective then the notion of purchasing a system that mimiks your structure.

Here’s my bullet point slide of thoughts on the issue of what they’re all missing:

• The internet is not setup as a one-stop-shop for everything and no one is diverse enough to get it all right
• Great new services pop up every few months
• The future is grassroots and collaborative (heard of twitter?)
• Organizational structures needs to flatten in response to technological empowerment
• Still in 2011, customization to these people is “you can change the color and add your logo” (wow thanks!)
• There are no central hubs and we have many authorities

If we were to redesign the university’s degree programs and colleges, how would we start?  Here’s my proposal for what a university would be without the current connotations of what a university is today.

A lot of people I know graduated from college I know never end up going into the field that was their focus of study.  This indicates to me that often times we’re being trained for something that either doesn’t matter or the job market may not be large enough to handle.  Then what happens is that you find yourself applying for jobs where they just want to see a college degree and this somehow isn’t odd to people?

“Well I know your a chemist but really I’m just looking for a piece of paper”

So what’s the paper mean to the employer in this instance?  Well, the hope is that if you completed a program from a 4-year program that you follow through with things and that you have to have a certain base-line of intelligence.  As technology ramps up though I see people that are more test and fact driven then generalizable skills driven.

How do we restructure the university?  Everything is about emphasis but everyone gets the same degree.  This is the concept of “general education credits” to the extreme.  Use the world view shifting courses like philosophy and Sciences Technology and Society (STS) as a model.  The topics of the “courses” become focused on learning how to learn.  Today more then ever people need to be life long learners or their skills can silo’ed as to the careers and oppurtunities available to them.

We need to focus more on this and the practical application within different fields of study because lets be honest, the corporate world is going to tell you day one what you do and do not need to understand.  Companies will run you through what they want you to know shortly after being there regardless of your training.  Yes there will always be skills acquired in higher education but those can increasingly be looked up on the internet.

Some more details of this vision:

• Take the first 3 years and focus on teaching people HOW TO THINK CRITICALLY
• Everything I read and videos I watch indicates that skills taught in the first 2 years of the university experience for technical fields is outdated by the time they get their degree, front-load thinking and then skill acquisition becomes easier and cram that all into year 4
• Blended learning and web-augmented courses need to be the norm.  No online exclusive courses, no in class + powerpoint exclusive courses
• At the end you get the same degree as everyone else using things traditionally seen as minors to show emphasis
• Tie in all subjects to “courses” which should be more of learning experiences.  Philosophy of design is extremely important to teach as it’s a pervasive concept running through all fields (why was xyz designed the way it was historically)

In it they talk about students building their own LMS.  The discussion is framed mostly around “well, why would they do that” and my thoughts immediately came to reuse, remix and fragmentation culture.  They talk about 3 efforts by students at different universities to replace their LMS with something new.  I highly recommend checking it out as well as previous episodes as they give some thoughts on Structured Anarchy.  The talk got me thinking about the idea of students as part of development (which I’d love to flush out into its own post in the future) but it really got me churning about LMS unification vs fragmentation.

These two two camps seem to be developing in not only the LMS community but in Technology as a whole.  The unification crowd is most prominently represented by companies like Apple.  Buy into the Apple way of thinking and product line and life is good (great actually).  Get irked by the Apple-Standards (connectors, iProducts and iPeripherals) as opposed to universal standards and well, you’re more often than not in the Fragmentation or Google crowd at the moment.

I’m not saying one is better than the other.  I prefer the Android platform for personal reasons much as many prefer iOS in much the same way.  The Fragmentation crowd (which I am typically a member of) believe that the way towards the best end-product for students is to restructure the old ways of systems organization — that is large, singular systems — and instead adopt very (scary) loosely coupled systems.

Decentralization is scary because the thought is that this can cause resource waste.  And not just competing but similar efforts wasting man and woman hours in coding, testing, requirements gathering, etcetera.  And resource waste, especially during budget cuts is never something anyone wants to consider.  We need to be running more efficiently not playing around with new ways of doing the same thing.

So how do we walk (and identify) that fine line between what is better being left unified and what should be left fragmented?  Surely there are times when unification are king.  I mean no one wants a fragmented calendaring system (try scheduling a non-oracle users for a meeting).

Here is my current measuring stick for whether we should or should not unify / standardize / centralize a service:

• Is the need a simple task or can it mean different things to different people? (i.e. Calendaring system vs Content Management System)
• Is the system an actor in the interaction? (see Actor Network Theory — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory)

Let’s apply the rules to Email (protocol not client). What do people want to do? Send text from one person to another (CC/BC is the same process duplicated).  Is Email an Actor? No, in and of itself Email is not an actor in the transaction, it is simply getting a message from one place to another.  Email = Unified.  Calendaring systems line up in much the same way.

The Actor criteria is paramount to simplicity, though actors are rarely simple so they usually are just “no, yes” or “yes, no” assessments.  Is the system imbued with intelligence in some way or is it just a dumb-terminal (by design)?

Let’s look at our decision to build the ELIMedia Asset management system.  Is it a simple, single purpose system?  No, an Asset is like a node, it can be anything to anyone.  Can Asset management systems be an actor in the ANT model? Yes.  Asset management systems need to make decisions about copyright, permission, workflow, and embedding.  They should email or track usage of assets across infrastructures.  There’s a lot involved there!

So by my criteria, asset management systems should not be standardized?  Seems a bit strange yes?  I mean assets are wanted to live in one place all the time and be reused in many places many times.  That’s a 1 to many relationship, why not have a 1 AMS to many locations relationship? I argue that I may think of assets very differently from you from someone else.  Are we talking assets like video, audio and image source files?  Or are we talking tables, chairs, computers and physical assets of a university? Or maybe its documents like syllabi, Powerpoint slides, webpages, and working course documents?

Very different sounding systems based on the context they are used in, right? Hence, we run ELIMedia and while I’d love other people to use that system, my own assessment of needs suggests they should run their own version at the very least.  This is the only way they can truly tailor towards their needs.  Again, turning to concepts of fragmentation and Structured Anarchy: build and reuse part of whats already been built and tailor the last 2-10% to your own needs. (aside: ELIMedia will be released as a Distribution by the end of the year… just saying ).

I’d be interested to see my criteria applied to other systems / technologies to see what we come up with.  Grade books, Forums, Course Content, Syllabi, drop boxes?  How granular could we get and still have it make sense? As my take, Grade books and forums should be standardized / centralized, course content / syllabi / drop box environments… I think not.  How bout you?

anytime I’m told we’re building it ourselves I feel like we must be doing something wrong

And yes, historically this is accurate.  If you went it (truly) alone without any underlying structure you were “doing it wrong”.  Starting from a single line of code and working from there is not the way to go about tackling our problems.

What I’m calling for though isn’t to start from nothing; far from it.  Today I would like to introduce a phrase I heard recently that hit me so hard I had to write about it.  It’s the phrase I’ve been looking for to describe what I’m building towards and what I’m personally calling for in future development strategies: Structured Anarchy (SA).

At first glance this phrase may seem set against itself.  How can something be structured and have order, while at the same time lacking order and structure entirely?

Take the forest as an example:  While you can look at the forest and say that the trees have been chaotically dispersed; you can see the trees as individual components of that random landscape.  They have defining characteristics and all have a similar underlying structure.  Some trees are different shapes after years of growth, but they are all generally the same (having leaves, branches, roots, etc).

This is what I hope to build with our future implementations of ELMS.  A forest, so dense and seemingly random in layout that there is no organization.  Some trees having more branches than others, or different colored leaves; yet, still all sharing the same underlying structure and coming from the same source of seeds.

I have been implementing our own form of SA in-house by slowly moving us further and further from centralized systems.  Here is a chart of our move towards Structured Anarchy since 2006:

We start out very centralized, only housing our own core content in Dreamweaver files.  Then you can see we slowly transition from a centralized system, to our own.  The process continues and increases in pace as we shore up more and more of our own Information Architecture.

My plans of structured anarchy, often referred to as project Ulmus, has helped us put our destiny in our own hands and given us greater control of how we want to develop and structure course materials going forward.  The idea being that we can continue to provide better experiences for our students and staff through continued refinement of our own infrastructure while centralized authorities must remain relatively static in order to serve the general population.

Part of our success with SA involves the organic spread of the technology.  We’ve had many early adopters locally but now the time has come to attempt to spread the reach of ELMS further.  Later this year, a full version of the ELMS core platform will be released with more systems to follow by the end of 2011 into 2012.  Currently, I am working on ELMS Core – Alpha 3 but it is planned to be production ready by August 2011 (in-house) with public and internal releases shortly there after.

ELMS Core is just the first in a series of distributions that you’ll see released in an effort to not only nudge us further away from central systems but help increase platform sustainability through adoption.  Currently the second and third distribution releases are:

• Asset management component to simplify the embedding and copyright management of media
• Student collaboration component with a heavy focus on critique and community

The idea isn’t to make each of these “products”,if you want to call them that, do Everything.  The idea is to have each one focused on meeting a certain goal and using minor APIs and authentication to knit all the systems together. This has shown to not be an issues for students or faculty (through anecdotal evidence as well as minor surveys) over the last five years that we have been moving in this direction.

So the message hasn’t changed from last year.  Technology has been empowering in the past and it continues to be today.  As such, we are constantly able to do more with less (ELMS is still a one-shop, one-person show) and look to keep moving in an increasingly independent direction.

I look forward to the coming year and where this discussion may take us instructionally as well as technologically.  Please feel free to offer your two-cents on the concept of Structured Anarchy or our direction in general.

• Wow, a lot more people are building then I thought!
• Wow, a lot more colleges are using Drupal then I thought!
• uhh..Who’s job is it to run this site?
• uhh.. if we go Drupal who will support us?

To address the first two “wow” moments, yes, it is amazing how many people have adopted Drupal at the university.  I don’t have hard numbers for this but considering I knew about 4 Drupal sites when we started using it in 2007, and as of this posting there are currently 105 listed on the Site Listing, growth has been significant.  The list isn’t finished at 105 either; I know of about 50 or so not on the and know of 3 high profile sites actively working towards porting over to Drupal.

Now to address the last two points: Who’s job is this and how will we get support?  Personally, and this is why this posting lives on my blog, I don’t see these as issues.  We don’t need any one person, one group, one anything to determine the path that Drupal will take at this university.

The usage of Drupal at Penn State has been a completely grass-roots movement and should remain as such.  There is power in it being decentralized though money has been a big factor in it remaining that way.  Here are a few reasons for decentralization (where we are now):

• The creation of one unit focused on Drupal development will create overhead in management, staff hirings and building space that no one can afford
• We all think of Drupal sliiightly differently from one another (which is a good thing) so there is no magic bullet install / configuration
• Colleges and departments can use whatever platform they want, Drupal, hacked drupal, non-drupal at anytime and still have local control over their content, design and development

So the problem / opportunity is that currently, everyone is running Drupal on their own.  They are developing on their own, creating sites and managing servers on their own.  This seems very redundant right? We could centralize everything and all run off of one Drupal core and only allow x,y,z feature set, right? Everyone can be happy and work under one banner.

…in a fantasy perhaps.

It is because we are not centralized that we have been able to:

• take an incredibly flexible platform, add to it and make it meet our own needs
• speak the same language (technically) and share ideas about how to fix issues we encounter because we are using the same platform (and backend technologies for the most part)
• develop modules and themes that we can each learn from and tinker with to match our specific environmental needs

Platform fragmentation is not only good for us, it’s necessary for sustainable growth.

But we still have the question of support. Sure some of us can develop great things, but how do we get everyone “off the bench and into the game”.  How do we support people that want to get involved and use Drupal?

{enter stage left} Drupal @ Penn State community hub.  This site is the piece that has been missing.  Not a single, centrally supported solution, but a loosely knit entity which can unite us under “one banner”.  That’s not to say that central doesn’t play a future role in development, but it isn’t the gate keeper, no one is (no not even me :p).

Where do you go for help in building your Drupal site? Drupal.psu.edu, THe MyIT forums, groups.drupal.org then drupal.org.  It’s a very different way of thinking about development then most of us are used to but it is necessary for our survival. If you develop in a vacuum, STOP and embrace open development practices.  It will look good on you, your unit, your college, your university and Drupal as a whole.  It is also the only way to sustain innovative work in these tough economic times.

Jump in, contribute, communicate, ask questions, answer questions and let’s innovate our way forward together!