Learning Technology at Oxford Oxford University

Chuck Severance, University of Michigan, looks at Learning Management Systems and what comes next. This presentation gives an overview of the the open source project Tsugi project and applications of the Tsugi software in building a distributed approach to teaching and learning tools and content. It is not sufficient to simply make a bunch of small web-hosted things and claim we have 'implemented' the Next Generation Digital Learning Environments (NGDLE). We must be able to coherently search, find, re-construct and re-combine those 'small pieces' in a way that allows teaching and learning to happen. To do this, each of the learning application and content providers must master detailed interoperability standards to allow us 'mash up' and bring those distributed and disparate elements back together. While there has been much said about the ultimate shape and structure of the NGDLE, and there are many current and emerging interoperability standards, there is little effort to build and train providers with usable technology that will empower thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to create and share applications and content that will populate the new learning ecosystem.

In effect, we need to build the educational equivalent of the Apple App Store. Except that it needs to be open and extensible and not depend on a single vendor intent on maximizing shareholder value. This presentation will show how the Tsugi project is doing research into how this works in actual practice. Tsugi is a 100 per cent open source production-ready application and content hosting system that is simple enough to use to allow interoperable and pluggable learning applications or learning content to be built, hosted, deployed and shared by individuals or various-sized organizations.

Charles is a Clinical Associate Professor and teaches in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He is the Chair of the Sakai Project Management Committee (PMC). Previously he was the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project and worked with the IMS Global Learning Consortium promoting and developing standards for teaching and learning technology.