Open Source Licensing
IMS LIS Outcomes and Sakai Standardizing Grade Exchange
John A. LewisChief Software ArchitectUnicon, Inc.
Sakai 2010 Conference17 June 2010
Copyright Unicon, Inc., 2010. Some rights reserved. This work is
licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United
States License.
To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
Special thanks to Gary Gilbert for all his help with this
presentation and demo!
Intro to IMS Outcomes
Background
IMS Outcomes Management Service
Part of the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS)
Specification
Version 1.0 (Currently in public draft)
Released March 2010
Primary contributors:IMS, Oracle, Pearson, SunguardHE,
Desire2Learn, Blackboard
Overview
Formal definition: the definition of how systems manage the
exchange of information that describes Outcomes
How to exchange assignment and grade data in a standard way
Key Terminology
LineItem: assignment in context (course, course section,
etc)
Result: grade for a student in a context
Outcomes Data Model
Details on Line Item
A "gradable object" of a given type (e.g. true/false, multiple
choice, etc) that is associated to a particular context for a
particular data source (i.e. the application where the user would
do the assignment)
Contains a collection of results
Details on Results
A person's grade on a particular line item
Can represent the current state of a person's line item attempt
(e.g. In-Process)
Outcomes Services
Line Items Services
LineItemManager InterfaceDefines CRUD operations for line
items
Typically, exposed as a web service by the system that controls
the gradebook
Supporting servicesLineItemTypeVocabluaryManager,
LineItemWeightManager
Results Services
ResultManager interfaceDefines CRUD operations for results
Like the LineItemManager service, exposed as a web service by
the system that controls the gradebook
Supporting servicesResultValueManager, ResultStatusManager
How Outcomes Relates to LTI
IMS Outcomes is its own specification however it is also a
"profile" of the IMS LTI specification
That is, the parties (that agree to the LTI contract) may extend
that contract to include Outcomes
Outcomes + LTI Benefits
Outcomes tool launch - direct accesses from Gradebook to line
item or result
A guarantee that the tool consumer will expose the
LineItemManager and ResultManager interfaces as web services
Deployment time agreement on security profiles of the web
services (typically, WS-Security) and POST (typically, hash message
(MAC/OAuth) token security)
Deployment time provisioning of outcomes endpoint locations in
the tool provider
Pearson's Implementation
Overview / Value to Pearson
Implemented as part of Pearson TPI Program (Third Party
Interoperability)Pearson implemented IMS Outcomes as profile of
Full LTI
Fits with their larger strategy of pushing of standards based
integrations
Potentially very high traffic / mission criticalChoose async
delivery using MOM
Overview / Value to Pearson
Each Pearson application (aka tool provider - e.g. MathXL) is a
client of the Outcomes services exposed thru the MOM
TPI reads messages off the MOM and delivers them to Partners
(aka tool consumers - e.g. Sakai) that expose Outcomes services -
typically, the partners have the gradebook
Extensions to the Spec (Ugh)
Unfortunately, the Outcomes spec didn't cover everything that
Pearson wanted
Had to extend the spec for:Additional line item level data
Additional result level dataIn both of the above cases, the
extension mechanism that is supported by the Outcomes data types
was deemed insufficient
Support for Pearson's internal SimpleAssessment type
Sakai Implementation
Why Pearson used Sakai
Sakai is the Full LTI tool consumer reference implementation
Test harness for Pearson TPI
Able to use the Sakai Gradebook for testing
Implementation Details
Sakai 2.5/2.6
Added to the existing Sakai Full LTI tool consumer
implementationNew web service (Spring WS) that exposed the LineItem
and Result Manager interface operations
Two new Java interfaces and implementations that fulfil the
LineItem and Result Manager contracts that back the web service
Implementation Details
Uses Sakai services:GradebookFrameworkService (to add gradebook
tool to existing worksite if not present)
GradebookExternalAssessmentService (to manipulate assessments
within Sakai)
All the other usual suspects: UserDirectoryService, SiteService,
CourseManagementService, SessionManager, ToolManager...
Support for tool launch from the Sakai Gradebook (but Pearson
TPI doesn't support it yet)
How the Data Maps
Sakai worksite/gradebook maps to line item contextIdentifier
Sakai worksite/gradebook could potentially map to many line item
data sources (multiple assessment engines)
A line in the Sakai gradebook (GB_GRADEABLE_OBJECT_T) maps to a
single line item uniquely identified by a GUID
A grade in the Sakai gradebook (GB_GRADE_RECORD_T) maps to a
single result uniquely identified by a GUID
IMS Outcomes Demo
In Sakai
More Information
IMS Learning Information Servicesimsglobal.org/lis
Not much else out there...
Working Pearson to contribute all the Sakai artifacts
Questions & Answers
John A. LewisChief Software ArchitectUnicon, Inc.
[email protected]
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