Hi, my name is btopro, and I believe we can fundamentally transform educational technology using Drupal.
Why do I say this?
- I work exclusively on the ELMS initiative, all built on Drupal
- I contribute everything that is developed for the ELMS Initiative
- I know that giving away technology changes society
- Increasingly, universities are using Drupal for.. EVERYTHING!
In this presentation, I'll highlight the approach I am taking to transform edtech by showing a network of Drupal distributions. I often refer to this as the ELMS Learning Network (ELMSLN); a series of Drupal distributions that connect to a traditional learning management system (LMS) using LTI and web services. This runs counter to edtech implementations historically because The structure and nature of education system deployments is wrong.
LTI stands for learning tools interoperability and is adopted by major LMS vendors. LTI allows for LMS mash-ups in which you push and pull users between systems without the need for multiple accounts to be remembered. It’s essentially an OAuth request but most importantly, there’s a Drupal module to do it!
This presentation won’t focus on LTI specifically and thus assumes a certain level of audience understanding of what LTI helps you accomplish (which this session sounds like it covers). In this presentation I’ll do the following:
- Quickly outline the philosophy of design of ELMS LN
- Give a live demo of this working in our environment, starting with an LMS LTI launch
- Distributions that will be discussed / shown include:
- Talk about key modules that make this approach maintainable including:
- RestWS
- Lti_tool_provider
- CIS Connector
- CoSign / single authentication
- Drush (doi!)
I’ll try to stay relatively high level though some examples will be shown to help demonstrate the practicality of implementing RestWS for web serverices. A Drush helper script to make this solution more manageable will also be discussed in passing.
All are welcome and let's help build better toolsets together!
Note: This is a follow up to my Drupal Camp NJ 2013 presentation of a similar title.
- Log in to post comments