integration

I've been thinking about how to get a handle on distributed administration and delegated authority for the integration system. It's just something I thought up without much consultation, so take it as what it is: the idle thoughts of someone in IT trying to figure out the business of academic units. And being a typical IT solution, it's based around the data that I can see in existing systems. I'll leave it up to the business to tell me if this makes any sense.

(or: Don't worry, I'm only looking at what's inside the box)

I've been chatting with a handful of people about where they see teaching and learning systems going over the next few years at my institution. There are still more people I need to talk to but I think I'm starting to get a general idea of what everyone is thinking. And, to varying degrees of urgency and scope, everyone is thinking the same thing: the centrally operated Learning Management System is but one of a collection of components that can be used for the purpose of teaching and learning. It is not even the centre of such a collection. Rather, all of the components (including the LMS) should be accessible through a single unifying user interface, such as a portal, and they should all be able to work together with deep integrations between them. Yes, it's the loosely coupled collection of tools. My director had it right all along. The difference is, and it might have been a misunderstanding on my part, that there will continue to be one standard platform available (an LMS now, perhaps a standard configuration of tools later) for the less adventurous who do not care to customize.

As usual, and especially on this topic, I speak only for myself, not on behalf of my employer.

This is background information on a problem that I've been scratching around in for the last little while. All we know is that we're going to be building some kind of integration system to automatically provision access into some kind of Learning Management System. Almost nothing else is known. And as soon as we know more, the clock will begin ticking to get it done. That means that this is the only opportunity to sit down and have a really good think about what it is that should be built, even though we know very little about what it should do.

Let me start out by stating as fact that, at this time, the university I work and study at absolutely must have one centrally-operated Learning Management System. There are visionaries here who see us moving some day to a collection of loosely coupled tools that work well together, allowing everyone to pick and choose as they like and as suits individual needs and styles. Certainly some of the more adventurous faculty have already started adopting some of these tools. Regardless of whether this happens some day at the university level, and regardless of my personal beliefs in the appropriateness of this use of technology, in reality, at the university level, that day is not today or tomorrow. In my opinion, and in the private and not-so-private opinions of many of these visionaries as well, we're just not ready to take that step at this time.

During the last LMS implementation, we — but before I joined this team — built an integration system which had the ability to automatically provision students' access into appropriate LMS sections based on their actual course section enrolments in the Student Information System. This was conceptually based on the earlier integration system that we built for the previous LMS from the same vendor; due to radical technology changes, it was more of a spiritual successor than a new version. The model for both of these integrations was for someone (instructors in the first version, instructional support staff in the second) to use a web application to provision LMS sections. During this provisioning process, they also selected SIS sections that would be associated with these LMS sections. Then the back-end systems that were purpose-built for this integration would automatically keep LMS enrolments in sync with the associated SIS enrolments, usually with a delay on the order of a few minutes.