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LearningLocker LRS - version 1.0 now available
Learning Locker has left beta and is now at version 1.0. This may be a significant milestone in a series of developments that could profoundly affect the future of online learning and perhaps the whole educational system.
Learning Locker is an open source implementation of a TinCan (xAPI) learning record store (LRS). It provides a repository to record information about learning activities and outcomes, using open standards for import and export. That's about it: some sorting and search tools, some export facilities, and the means to store information about learning from other applications. While other xAPI LRSs already exist, this open source implementation seems the most promising so far, the most feature-complete, and the most likely to see widespread adoption. OK, unless you are a learning technology geek I realise that this might sound rather dull and arcane, but the potential for disruption, especially given widespread support for the experience API (xAPI) standard in a wide range of applications, is quite high. Amongst other things:
- it is a critical part of the infrastructure to free us from the mediocre monolithic silos of learning management systems which, in educational systems till now, have typically been the place where learning activities occur, content is produced, and progress is recorded. By separating the function of recording progress from the means of delivery, it massively increases the range of information and applications that can be used in an integrated way for education, from games to social media systems, MOOCs to traditional classroom activities, and everything between. It allows a great many more forms of progress to be recorded at any level of granularity, from solving a puzzle in a game to looking at a web page, from doing an exam to writing a thesis. It makes it significantly easier to switch between platforms.
- it allows any and every kind of evidence of learning to be recorded, of great benefit to lifelong learners wishing to provide evidence of, and to reflect on and to plan a learning journey. Freeing such data from guarded silos means learners can control their own learning records, keeping them in a cloud, on their own servers or their own computers, transferring them as and when they wish. This goes far beyond the basic functionality of an e-portfolio system, but integrates beautifully with one. It, or something very like it, is a vital piece in the move towards truly open learning at a level that has the potential to disrupt the traditional education and training system.
- it makes possible a wide range of analytics for the benefit of learners (and, potentially, for the benefit of teachers and organizations) that go far beyond the structured assessment and activity records that can be captured by an LMS. From finding people with a particular set of skills to analyzing holes in your own learning to organizational learning profiling, the possibilities are huge.
This just scratches the surface of the potential of this technology and standard, and it is just going to get better. More information about Learning Locker is available at http://learninglocker.net
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Jon Dron
Jon Dron
Comments
Very interesting - thank you Jon. This challenges me from several perspectives and possibly it is just a case of understandiong the language.
The Landing (Elgg) has opened my eyes to the beauty of a social networked learning environment and how the environment and the power of user-control within this environment allows not only for self-moderation but allows for persistant and permanent artefacts that offer value to learners/users past, present, and future. I do not quite understand how or where an LRS fits into this picture. I read some of what is on the Learning Locker site but again I think that language gets in my way.
I am not asking you to dumb this down but would you be able to provide an example of how you see an LRS fitting in to our existing systems?
Thanks Stuart -
An LRS is simply a means to record the learning process and results in a single repository, independently of the tools and methods used. Nothing more, nothing less. The fun part is in what you can do with that.
There are already TinCan plugins for Moodle (e.g. https://github.com/garemoko/moodle-mod_tincanlaunch and associated plugins for quizzes etc) that allow activities and outcomes of activities in Moodle to be stored in an LRS. Some work is already in progress for Elgg and Mahara plugins that will do much the same. It we happened to have any other systems (e.g. Blackboard, Sakai, Desire2Learn, Wordpress, Drupal, etc) they could do the same. There are also stand-alone apps and various learning tools including mobile apps and games that can record assertions to an LRS - the list is growing fast - see http://tincanapi.com/adopters/ for a small range of examples. Bookmarklets can be used to record some things from systems (mostly just reading web pages) even if they do not natively support xAPI. This means that any activity deemed worthy of recording in any of these systems, from viewing a page to making a blog post to taking an assessment, can be recorded as an assertion - e.g. "x read y" or "x got 50% on this test" or "x commented on discussion post" or "x visited this museum" or "x participated in this Adobe Connect session" or "x completed this course" or "x got a GPA of 4.0 on this course" and can be read by any other system that supports the standard.
The results can be displayed, aggregated and processed in many ways, both by the learner and by others with access to the LRS. There are already quite a few LRS viewing apps, query tools and plugins for many systems, including Moodle. I think that there is a good chance, or at least an opportunity, for LMSs to become nothing more than LRSs, with the various other functions now bundled with them disaggregated into much more flexible and open toolsets.
The information in the LRS might be useful to a learner, who can see his or her own progress, spot areas that are missing, assemble evidence for a portfolio, import competence information across institutions, etc. If aggregated, this might be useful in an adaptive system, letting learners make use of other learners' paths to suggest potential activities or content, or to point to issues with learning designs that allow developers to adapt them better. It might be useful to a teacher, who can see stats on how things are going at a class or individual level, and areas that need more effort. It might be useful to an institution to track who knows what, or to identify the pedagogies and processes used by the institution, or to spot holes in the catalogue. It might be integrated with open badges for accreditation or simply used as a place to store accreditation information. Note that, in all cases, this is independent of the tools or platforms being used as part of the learning process - whether evidence comes from Moodle, the Landing, Mahara, a cellphone app or your own Wordpress blog, it all becomes part of the same stream, and can be used or analyzed in exactly the same way. Note too that it is in principle independent of institution so for things like credit transfer it might be a godsend.
The uses are really only limited by resources and imagination - an LRS is simply a bit of necessary plumbing that provides information about learning activities on top of which any number of tools can be built. Earlier attempts at standardizing this like SCORM and various IMS-supported initiatives were way too prescriptive and over-complex while at the same time missing things that might matter. The Experience API (xAPI) is both much simpler and much more expressive, which means it is far more likely to be used and far more likely to be useful - interoperability is a non-issue. Eventually, it is not impossible that most or all of the online learning tools we might use could make use of this standard.
I've written a little more about this over the past couple of years or so at Learning Locker and Project Tin Can that may be helpful.
Jon
Thank you - now to make sense of it in my context - I have reading to do