In this case, user state is most likely to be saved on the publisher’s website, rather than the LMS, because different applications will have different architectures and data structures etc, and different requirements about what data or objects to save. I don’t think the application and the LMS will communicate during the student’s session.

In the academic world at least, all that people will need is a web-services gradebook API that lets the publisher directly write grades for students into the LMS gradebook. I’m not sure how consistently gradebooks are implemented across different academic LMSs. Is LTI the right protocol for this?

And I would not single out any one vendor… over and over again, with different LMSs, I’ve seen new features added that are cool in theory but impractical to use in the real world, e.g. because no school has the time/expertise/staff/businessreason/whatever to use it.

Maybe it’s silly to wish it could be otherwise, but it’s too bad instructional designers don’t have more of a voice. It might move the industry ahead faster, and maybe the purchasers at universities would be less confused.

I admit I haven’t looked at LTI, and take your word that it is a good interoperability standard. But is it fundamentally much different from the old AICC standard, really? Should I be excited about it? Is it going to cause more learning applications to get built?

Hope that’s clearer.

Seriously, though, I’m all in favor of interoperability standards–things that make a learning experience communicate with a tracking system. I’m not an advocate of standards for the learning experience itself.

SCORM, in it’s approach, had both aspects I never liked SCORM’s effort to try to make “shareable” or “reusable” content–it implied a vision of de-contextualized content. Blech. But being able to use an LMS to save student state in my simulation and to report results back to that LMS is very useful in getting my simulation adopted. So I like that part very much. This is why, in many ways, I think SCORM 1.2 is more important than SCORM 2004. The fact that higher ed hasn’t used it is more a factor of how assessment/certification is done in that context. But I digress.

In any case, if you look at LTI I don’t think you’ll find anything pedagogically limiting there. But maybe I’m missing your point.

Learning standards remind me of Paul Wolfowitz’s infamous comment that, though weapons of mass destruction weren’t the real reason we invaded Iraq, it was nevertheless made the reason because it was “the one issue that everyone could agree on.”

Wouldn’t you agree that SCORM is almost never used in higher education?

One of the things that bothered me about the Common Cartridge discussion is that there doesn’t seem to be any clear conceptual bridge between learning “content” and learning activities (even if we will eventually have a technical bridge between Common Cartridge and LTI). After spending years struggling to figure out just what the heck a re-usable learning object would look like, I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing. The term “learning object” should be considered harmful because it reinforces an artificial distinction between content and activities. There was no sign this week that the higher education community as represented at Learning Impact is ready to reframe the problem (or even fully recognize the need for reframing it) in more productive terms.