7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 10:00am Keynote - Standards to Enable an Open Learning Ecosystem
Speaker: Charles Severance, Clinical Associate Professor and teaches in the School of Information at the University of Michigan

The concept of a Learning Management System is nearly 20 years old. For the most part, modern-day Learning Management Systems are simply well-developed versions of those first learning systems developed at universities and commercialized through companies like Blackboard, WebCT, and Angel. Since the early LMS systems were developed for a single organization and developed as a single application, it was natural for them to keep adding more functionality to that single application. Vendors like WebCT and Blackboard added proprietary formal expansion points to their LMS systems like Building Blocks and PowerLinks. In 2010, the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability Specification was introduced and provided a basic expansion point across the whole industry. LTI greatly expanded the number of applications that could be integrated into an LMS - but those integrations were naturally limited because of the simplicity of LTI 1.1. In this talk we will look at the standards activities over the past five years that have been laying the groundwork to move from simple plug-in integrations to a learning ecosystem where the LMS is just one part of that ecosystem. We will look at the work that has been done and what is left to do to deliver an open learning ecosystem.

10:00am – 10:15am Break

10:15am – 11:15am Policies for Adopting and Implementing LTI apps into your Learning Environment
Speaker: Hap Aziz, Facilitator, Connected Learning Innovation Community

The promise of LTI apps to streamline the integration of extended functionality into the learning environment is tremendous. The challenge, however, is in developing institutional policies that provide a framework for the selection of appropriate app technologies. Building policies that recognize the value of LTI-conformant apps is critical to realizing the potential value and maximizing return on investment.

11:15am – 12:15pm LTI: The Intersection of Education, Innovation, and Technology
Speaker: Carrie Saarinen, Director, Instructional Solutions, Instructure

Cowpath paving, new trail blazing, and shooting for the stars - there are a lot of places educators, innovators and technologists want to go. In this session we'll unfold an LTI road atlas to look at destinations, roadside attractions, and service stations we need along the way to building better integrations.

12:15pm - 1:15pm Lunch

1:15pm – 2:45pm Developer’s Panel:

Filling in the Gaps with External Apps
Speaker: Chris Huston, Digital Specialist, Dartmouth College

Discuss reasons why we decided to develop External Apps for Canvas, present a sample of some of our apps, and finish with a description of the process we use in development.

Take Your LTI Integration to the Next Level
Speaker: Gary Gilbert, Technical Lead - Integrations and Analytics at Unicon

Did you know that the origins of the IMS Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) specification date back to 2006? Back then it was just called Tool Interoperability but the idea was the same - create a standard way for applications to integrate. Like many good things LTI took time to mature, but with its first public release in 2010 LTI was on its way. In the years since, due to combination of power and simplicity, LTI has taken off. Today LTI integrations are commonplace. In fact, I'm always surprised when I encounter an EdTech product that doesn't have an LTI integration. But if your product has an LTI integration you might be wondering... where do you go from here?

Lessons Learned from the Wordpress LTI
Speaker: Jamie Walker, Web Developer, Boston College

At the Boston College Center for Teaching Excellence we have strong motivation to find a way to integrate WordPress into our LMS with an LTI. (Our Director has asked us to try to get WordPress working as a tool in Canvas for him to use in the course he is teaching this semester.) In this presentation we’ll start with the limitations we’ve encountered in the existing open source WordPress LTI, review our process of deconstructing it, and talk about what we’ve learned so far regarding how and whether we can recycle it into an improved version that will meet our needs.

2:45pm – 3:30pm Panel Interactions and Q&A

3:30pm End