I’ve long believed the open practices we follow in the Sakai community result in more, better, faster functionality, code, security, accessibility, standards-compliance, and innovation generally. But lately, evidence has been mounting to demonstrate the high value and wide acceptance of the open path more clearly than ever.
Today’s announcement of a new partnership between rSmart and SunGard Higher Education (SGHE) to deliver and support Sakai is the latest manifestation of the huge body of valuable work being generated by those of us following the open path: commercial vendors, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, government entities, and individuals. Valuable work that is having real, positive effects on education.
A key part of rSmart and SGHE’s work together is to extend Sakai’s integration with SGHE’s Banner Student Information System (SIS) platform to follow the latest IMS Learning Information System (LIS) standard. On the face of it, this sounds like a typical outcome of two technology firms working together, but that integration rests on a far larger body of work, produced collaboratively in our open community.
Without even going in to the work of many that went into establishing the IMS LIS standard, rSmart and SGHE’s work with Sakai, Banner, and LIS extends the open-source work initiated by our fellow Sakai commercial affiliates Unicon and Oracle, under the leadership of my fellow Sakai Product councillors John Lewis and Michael Feldstein. This growing body of work promises to simplify and enrich Sakai’s SIS integration not just with SGHE’s Banner and Oracle’s Peoplesoft, but with every SIS platform that supports IMS LIS. Once we have this richer integration between our learning and administrative systems, we can start to explore all the ways shared information can have a real impact on our core mission of education.
Another example of open-source innovation centers around Sakai’s support for another worthy IMS standard: Basic Learning Tools Interoperability (BLTI), which makes it easy to tie different educational technology tools together. Sakai’s BLTI support was an early reference implementation and now ships in Sakai’s core codebase thanks in a large part to the work of long-time Sakai community member Chuck Severance. We are already seeing a wide variety of other open-source and proprietary tools support BLTI, making it easier for us to give users an integrated experience with a richer, varied toolset—and that exactly is the future of all learning platforms.
And while the Sakai community is working together on important standards support like IMS LIS and BLTI, we are also innovating actively on all sorts of other capabilities in both the mature Sakai 2 and the next-generation Sakai 3 platforms. Both Sakai platforms are under development by international, multi-institutional teams, coordinated by formal groups that conduct their business openly and transparently. Just this month we saw the Sakai 2.8 code freeze for the next release and the Sakai 3 0.7 release, both of which demonstrate rich innovation for technologies at very different points in their lifecycles.
What’s more: open innovation is not for code alone. Sakai’s Teaching and Learning working group recently released one of our most valuable artifacts: Sakai Learning Capabilities 1.0 (SLC 1.0).
Representing a full year of collaborative work, SLC 1.0 defines seven general areas of functionality that support teaching, learning, and collaboration. Of course we’ve seen functional checklists before—like Edutools or insert your own list here—and we continue to try to use such checklists to evaluate different learning platforms. That practice is akin to counting the spokes on buggy wheels while ignoring the changing paths we seek to travel, or the fact that not only are horse-drawn carriages obsolete, but even the internal combustion engine has evolved from solution to problem.
SLC 1.0 is an entirely different kind of list. Instead of a mere catalog of isolated tool functions, SLC 1.0 presents seven “lenses,” or perspectives through which a learning platform can and should be viewed. Each of these lenses is not exclusive, but rather views the platform as a whole, in light of a specific group of cross-cutting concerns. Going further, SLC 1.0 is not a vision of what we will settle for—limited by an interpretation of what incremental changes are possible in the technologies we already use—but is instead a vision built by actual practitioners, guided by what we really want to accomplish in real educational situations, with real people who have goals not organized by the buttons already on their toolbars.
I hope to see SLC 1.0 and its subsequent elaborations and extensions forever change the way we judge—and build—not just Sakai, but all educational technologies.
I’ve just begun to scratch the surface of what’s brewing in the growing critical mass of the Sakai community, but one thing is clear: the open road ahead promises to be crowded with new collaborators, good ideas, and real results.
