The document discusses IMS Outcomes and its implementation in Sakai. IMS Outcomes is a specification for exchanging assignment and grade data in a standard way. It defines services for managing line items (assignments) and results (grades). Pearson implemented IMS Outcomes as a profile of IMS LTI. Sakai implemented IMS Outcomes services to allow its gradebook to interface with external learning tools via the Pearson implementation. The demo showed assignment and grade data exchange between Sakai and external tools using the IMS Outcomes standard.

1. IMS LIS Outcomes and Sakai Standardizing Grade Exchange John A. Lewis Chief Software Architect Unicon, Inc. Sakai 2010 Conference 17 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!

2. Intro to IMS Outcomes

3. Background IMS Outcomes Management Service

4. Part of the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) Specification

5. Version 1.0 (Currently in public draft)

6. Released March 2010

7. Primary contributors: IMS, Oracle, Pearson, SunguardHE, Desire2Learn, Blackboard

8. Overview Formal definition : the definition of how systems manage the exchange of information that describes Outcomes

9. How to exchange assignment and grade data in a standard way

11. Key Terminology LineItem : assignment in context (course, course section, etc)

12. Result : grade for a student in a context

13. Outcomes Data Model

15. 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)

16. Contains a collection of results

17. Details on Results A person's grade on a particular line item

18. Can represent the current state of a person's line item attempt (e.g. In-Process)

19. Outcomes Services

20. Line Items Services LineItemManager Interface Defines CRUD operations for line items Typically, exposed as a web service by the system that controls the gradebook

21. Supporting services LineItemTypeVocabluaryManager, LineItemWeightManager

22. Results Services ResultManager interface Defines CRUD operations for results

23. Like the LineItemManager service, exposed as a web service by the system that controls the gradebook Supporting services ResultValueManager, ResultStatusManager

24. How Outcomes Relates to LTI IMS Outcomes is its own specification however it is also a "profile" of the IMS LTI specification

25. That is, the parties (that agree to the LTI contract) may extend that contract to include Outcomes

26. Outcomes + LTI Benefits Outcomes tool launch - direct accesses from Gradebook to line item or result

27. A guarantee that the tool consumer will expose the LineItemManager and ResultManager interfaces as web services

28. Deployment time agreement on security profiles of the web services (typically, WS-Security) and POST (typically, hash message (MAC/OAuth) token security)

29. Deployment time provisioning of outcomes endpoint locations in the tool provider

30. Pearson's Implementation

31. Overview / Value to Pearson Implemented as part of Pearson TPI Program (Third Party Interoperability)

32. Pearson implemented IMS Outcomes as profile of Full LTI

33. Fits with their larger strategy of pushing of standards based integrations

34. Potentially very high traffic / mission critical Choose async delivery using MOM

35. Overview / Value to Pearson Each Pearson application (aka tool provider - e.g. MathXL) is a client of the Outcomes services exposed thru the MOM

36. 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

38. Extensions to the Spec (Ugh) Unfortunately, the Outcomes spec didn't cover everything that Pearson wanted

39. Had to extend the spec for: Additional line item level data

40. Additional result level data In 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