Martin:
It would be great if you joined the team. There hasn’t been much/any action 
since the Google hangouts meetup. The direction seemed to be to begin with an 
LTI interface to Moodle, just to get things rolling. That was based on the idea 
that LTI serviced the 3 most widely used LMS’s: Moodle, Blackboard, and Canvas. 
After some experience with that, the team could branch out. Each LMS appears to 
have its own idiosyncrasies, so there would have to be allowance for the 
differences.

The basic functionality would be:
1. user authentication and login, which would connect the app to the LMS
2. reporting of student actions
3. reporting of activity grade, if the app does the grading.

The main organizer of the group was William Jamieson and his last email to the 
group seemed to indicate that his project is pretty different in scope from 
what was described above, so he had a much lower stake in the outcome. I asked 
him for more information about his project so we could find common ground, but 
haven’t heard anything yet.

For educators, this could be a really exciting project and an entryway for an 
entirely new livecode audience. My personal contribution can’t be on the 
implementation of the protocols though. It would be a major effort and out of 
my field. However, the strategies and interfaces to the teacher/programmer and 
testing would be something I could contribute to.

One caveat is that my experience is based on what I know about the use of LMS’s 
by higher education. I retired before LMS’s got so popular and only SCORM 
existed at the time. Also there are other platforms that serve learning 
materials oriented toward K-12. For example, I was fairly impressed with some 
of the capabilities of Google’s education platform. It has great resources for 
Chromebooks and I haven’t explored whether there is any possible interface for 
external apps. My son is an elementary teacher and the low cost of Chromebooks 
makes that platform very attractive for elementary school teaching. I include 
this only to make my relative ignorance of other realms of education clear.

I know little about training for commercial and military customers. I do know 
that SCORM was developed for a fairly simple learning model and is a 
requirement for many of the military’s learning software purchases. Also, the 
education market is very different from when Hypercard was first introduced, so 
the enthusiastic adoption of Hypercard by college teachers who wanted to 
distribute learning materials to their students, may not be as easy to rebuild.

From my perspective as a retired college prof who has done a lot of educational 
technology (but not interfaced to LMS), the higher ed market is a ripe one. 
Livecode, with its power and ease of creating educational materials, could find 
a receptive audience for content creators with a bit of technical courage. 

But, what is needed, IMHO, is a suite of development tools targeted at that 
audience. It could be a major entry point for teachers and content developers 
and if it was easy to use, provide a new audience of livecode users. It would 
have to have sample stacks that did the basic operations, like log in to an 
LMS, report some subset of student actions, and report a grade for an activity. 
LTI was developed to provide a richer suite of information about student 
learning, rather than simply sending a grade. Educators found SCORM to be too 
limiting.

Here’s some of my perspective on online learning: When beginning as new 
technology implementers, they seem to start out following a textbook model, 
with presenting a bunch of content that students read, then they give a quiz. 
After they do this (since students aren’t all that impressed), they try to 
spiff up the reading part with better graphics, perhaps animations, and then 
they give a quiz. Then (again, learning and engagement doesn’t seem to improve) 
they try to spiff up the quiz by having the student click on various parts of a 
graphic, or do something more than answer a multiple choice question. I think 
these approaches can be a valuable element to help students get some basic 
knowledge and to test themselves on whether they have learned the material (I 
believe that learning needs to go much deeper). However, they don’t begin to 
use the rich capabilities of the technology. Livecode is in an excellent 
position to support simulations and more sophisticated learning products.

Some of the most effective apps are simulations where students enter 
parameters, observe the results, and report their findings and conclusions. 
Writing is an important element of that. Here is a link to a publication of 
mine where I implemented scientific exploration, science paper writing, and 
peer review in a large oceanography class:
http://es.earthednet.org/downloads/pubs/PROTHERO.pdf 
<http://es.earthednet.org/downloads/pubs/PROTHERO.pdf>
I feel that the writing process is essential. It is where students digest and 
organize their ideas. Peer review provides further learning by having students 
analyze and criticize others’ work. It is very effective, but needs to be 
implemented carefully or it won’t work or can be gamed by students. The paper 
in the link above describes how this is done.

Another great learning strategy is the use of games. Here’s a link to a great 
game demonstrating the “Tragedy of the Commons” effect for fisheries:
http://es.earthednet.org/fg-tutorials?q=node/14 
<http://es.earthednet.org/fg-tutorials?q=node/14>
Unfortunately, some copyright issues began to take a lot of my time, so I 
abandoned my support of the game.

That’s a lot more than discussed at the meeting, but I hope you found it 
interesting.

Best,
Bill




> On Oct 7, 2016, at 8:49 AM, Martin Koob <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi Bill
> 
> Thanks for all the information about LTI etc.   I am open to whatever it the
> best option for compatibility.  I had only read about Tin-Can xAPI.    I am
> developing an app for higher education and some potential customers said it
> had to be based on SCORM to integrate with their LMS.  When I looked at how
> SCORM worked I realized it would not work at all with the type of
> application I am developing.   Further searches lead to me finding Tin-Can
> and I realized that was the way for me to go.   
> 
> Bottom line is I want to be able to integrate with the LMS's used by
> colleges and universities so If LTI is the best way to do that I will jump
> on the bandwagon.   
> 
> I just noticed a post about a meeting on Oct 6th to discuss this:
> 
> *LiveCode to Education Industry API- Community project*
> 
> http://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=107&t=28034&p=147152#p147152
> 
> I noticed it too late to attend but I want to learn more about what happened
> there.
> 
> Martin Koob
> 
> 
> 
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/LiveCode-interface-to-SCORM-LIT-tp4708670p4709222.html
> Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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