[Building Sakai] IMS Common Cartridge import problems

[Keli Sato Amann]

Hi Zach,
Yes, I remember--we never did meet up at the IMS conference in Austin because I had the flu, then I came to Stanford a few months later in a completely different line of work. I'm surprised you had done any work on this at all, since I'm guessing no one paid you, and would have been even more surprised if you had built it out in full to support QTI and the like.

I believe the publishers have a two-tiered model, where basic content would be provided to their adopters for free (using CC for instance), and more robust interactive content would linked to on their servers (via LTI, for instance), so it could be charged for. After talking to you two years ago, I realized that no university would be interested in committing resources to further develop CC import--it was more of an interest to the publishers, who want to be able to support their Sakai-based customers with content, without having to create customized cartridges for each LMS. However, since CC content would be given away, publishers had little incentive to put up money.

That being said, if providing some level of free content to support their texts is still important to publishers, then producing custom content for each LMS just eats at profit. In this case, it would probably be in the interest of publishers to join together and fund a Sakai importer. They would need to estimate how much they are spending supporting custom cartridges and calculate savings that could be gained by funding this. Freelance developers (Zach, I know you are busy, but maybe Longsight, rSmart or Unicon?) might approach publishers (Pearson, Cengage, Wiley, etc.) to do this work. Kevin Riley of the IMS probably knows all the contacts at various publishers who would be interested.

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services, Stanford University


----- Original Message -----
From: "Zach A. Thomas" <zach at aeroplanesoftware.com>
To: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 10:23:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] IMS Common Cartridge import problems

On Jun 23, 2010, at 11:47 AM, Keli Sato Amann wrote:

> So Sakai 2.7 with these two patches will support import of CC? And
> this was possible in Sakai 2.4 too?
>
> I'm more curious than anything because in a former life, I worked at
> an educational publisher and it didn't seem like Sakai supported CC a
> couple years ago. Perhaps it did but it was untested at that time, or
> a new version was getting finalized. I haven't been keeping tabs on CC
> since changing jobs.
>
> If someone can attest that this import works, seems like the
> foundation should announce that, if they haven't already. I know the
> publishers wanted this for a while and it would help them to support
> their Sakai customers. If someone does test this against the official
> test packages from the IMS and it passes, that is great.
>
> One possible kink down the road is that while Tests and Quizzes
> (SAMigo) supports QTI 1.1, it expects quizzes to use those tags in a
> specific way and hasn't, up till now, supported the way that Respondus
> uses those tags. In SAMigo 2.8, we will give users a choice to
> designate which flavor of QTI they are importing--what we've been
> supporting as well as the way Respondus exports QTI. Would the
> importer need to be modified to support this as well?

Keli, I'm the one you spoke to back in your publisher days. The story is
(unfortunately) the same now as it was then: I wrote a very crude parser
before the CC spec was finished. It is able to unzip a cartridge and
stick some of its files into Resources. It _might_ recognize web links.
But it doesn't know about all the other good stuff that comes in a
cartridge: QTI tests, forums, and it doesn't know anything about
cartridge authorization. Considering it was never finished, this
probably isn't a blocker, but I would be happy for this area to get some
attention. I'm afraid I won't be able to work on it in the near-term.

cheers,
Zach

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