Blackboard’s Open Standards Commitments: Progress Made

On my arrival at Blackboard last year I shared my views with the industry about the importance of open standards in delivering a better future for online learning. I committed us to supporting key open standards. Moreover, I committed that we’d work to become a leader in this area rather than simply a participant. Today, I’m happy to inform you that deeds are arriving to support those words.

This week key industry players from open source, commercial software, end education circles gathered in Orlando for an IMS Global meeting. It seems fitting that the meeting is at the facilities for the Florida Virtual School, the largest and most successful program of its type that I know of, and a Blackboard partner that’s focused on employing open standards in its business. Florida Virtual is unique in being both a consumer of commercial content from publishers, a deliverer of online education, and a publisher of their own content. They’re a vivid illustration of the value of open standards in improving online education.

We chose this setting to share our first work in bringing support for the Common Cartridge to the Blackboard platform. We demonstrated a pre-release Building Block that imports Common Cartridge 1.0 packages into Blackboard Learn. It remains a work in progress, but this is an important step for progress in the industry. There are many who’ve wondered openly whether we’d actually deliver on our commitment to help the industry build this standard. Doubts will naturally remain until we ship the finished product, but we sent a very clear signal to the world about our seriousness. I’ll re-issue my commitment and renew our signal to our industry partners that now is the time to get onboard with us. Expect our next update to occur at Blackboard World 2010 in July.

I’ll share another update on this important standard, and risk testing your patience for acronyms. Yesterday the IMS voted on the new 1.1 Common Cartridge Specification to incorporate something called “Basic LTI.” This acronym stands for Learning Tool Interoperability. This means that in addition to open standards for content markup that there is now a strong direction in a related standard for integrating learning tools into LMS technologies in a more open and reliable way. While we’re still gaining momentum for standards in the industry, I think this is a very important step. We need both content publishers and learning tool developers working with greater certainty that they can write once and play anywhere to help our industry develop more appealing learning primitives.

I’m delighted to share that our team at Blackboard played a key role in driving LTI development. And today there are Building Blocks and PowerLinks to support the draft Basic LTI within Blackboard Learn and CE/Vista. They were developed by Stephen Vickers, a leading educational software developer and Technology Enhanced Learning Manager at the University of Edinburgh, and are available at the OSCELOT open source project web site (http://projects.oscelot.org/gf/project/bb-basiclti/). This early Basic LTI specification is seeing rapid adoption, and we’ve recently shown integrations with the Google App Engine, Sakai Wiki and other learning tools using this specification and Blackboard Learn.

Why does all of this matter? Because publishers, institutions, instructional designers, and faculty are all in the business of creating richer learning content for students. And as they create ever richer collections of content integrated with applications, it’s only natural that they’d like to share these creations. There are simply too many barriers to their doing so in today’s model. And while they’ll not solve every problem of portability, Common Cartridge and LTI are a potent force in eliminating the largest problems. I’m pleased with the progress we’re making as an industry, and even more pleased that Blackboard is fulfilling the promise of making meaningful contributions to this momentum.

Cheers,

Ray

Comments

[Jonmott]

Congratulations on your positive steps in this direction. Do you have plans to provide native LTI support in Blackboard (that doesn't require reliance on a Building Block)?

[Terry Patterson]

It's great to see the implementation and support that Blackboard has made, and continues to make within the educational technology industry in developing standards. For those of us within the Blackboard community, the focus that the organization has made to developing these standards and implementing them in the product lines makes our jobs easier. Our duties as content creators and course developers in the coming years will be less about the technology that operates with our LMS and more about what technology meets our objectives. Please keep us up to date.

[Brent Bailey]

One important question: Will these plugins and powerlinks make Blackboard's LMSs fully Common Cartridge compliant or only compliant at the Lite level?

So long as Blackboard does not support the open authorization part of the full CC specification, it will require publishers who want to protect their high-value content to continue to build and support special cartridges for each of Blackboard's LMS formats. To me, this seems to defeat the purpose of Common Cartridge.

[Ray Henderson]

Great questions. I’d like to ask my colleague here at Blackboard, Mark O’Neill, to weigh in with more detail. Expect something from him here shortly.

[Mark O'Neil]

Thank you, Ray!

I believe that Common Cartridge, through providing a ubiquitous and open standard will substantially lower the cost of provisioning digital assets for learning systems. In order for Common Cartridge to be successful it is important to provide a single and focused specification that will be widely adopted. The decision to make authorization optional in the full specification, which otherwise enforced a multiple cartridge (Full and Light) model, enables developer focus on a single target specification. I feel this new specification will garner the greatest implementation and generate the greatest adoption and certification.

When considering the emerging digital marketplace and its evolution, it becomes apparent that in order to best serve the consumers of content that any DRM take place at the content providers federated point of distribution, separately from the LMS or client local storage. Enforcing an access protocol within the specification, which embeds the 'market' into the content, is counter to other accepted content models eg: mp3, html, etc. If we look to successful distribution models it becomes apparent that those which are access control free or apply DRM at the original point of delivery (eg: the providers service) are the ones most readily adopted by consumers.

Utilizing a federated distribution model which leverages remote DRM, where links to content, rather than the content itself, is delivered in the cartridge becomes very light-weight and affords the greatest degree of content versioning and protection for the content creators. Additionally, following this model, Common Cartridge support of native based LTI will further enhance the abilities of provisioning remote distributed content.

I feel this evolution of content delivery positions content producers with the greatest flexibility in providing long term sustainable delivery of DRM content through a variety of systems and applications. This benefits consumers as they have access to the best available digital content for teaching and learning.

It is for the above reasons that Blackboard's Common Cartridge implementation will not include authorization.

For further information on Common Cartridge you may visit the IMS Common Cartridge site at: http://www.imsglobal.org/cc/

Cheers,
-m