LiveCode interface to SCORM /LIT

Tue Oct 11 16:57:50 EDT 2016

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 <mkoob at rogers.com> 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
> 
> 
> 
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