LETSI: The International Federation for
Learning, Education, and Training Systems Interoperability

December 2010

LETSI is an international organization focused on accelerating innovation in elearning by enabling the secure exchange of data among current and future systems, website, and mobile apps that:

• Offer immersive, mobile, and collaborative learning activities for individuals and teams (both commercial and free; available on popular devices; communicating data back to any LMS).
• Use artificial intelligence and extensive student models to help students learn and give useful feedback to teachers – not just a score.
• Help teachers and learners find, preview, buy, customize, store, and organize online learning activities.
• Help teachers and private tutors manage student rosters, lesson plans, grade books, and administrative reports.
• Help teachers assign activities to a learner or a team, and get notified in real time of their status, and observe and coach learners online, from an iPhone.
• Help teachers and SME’s create and share online learning activities.
• Give learners explicit control of who gets to see their historical data and learner profiles: employers, educational institutions, teachers, private tutors, online learning activities, ….
• Allow teachers, parents, learners, and administrators to post evaluations and recommendations about all of these products and services.

Effective use of web technology has transformed many industries and changed the way we all shop, read the news, and find a date. Allowing innovative elearning systems to easily plug into installed systems and databases is key to rapid adoption of new products, teaching methods, and business models. Lowering barriers to adoption and seeing results rapidly is also key to justifying the prolonged investment and institutional disruption that will be required to transform education and training.

Active Working Groups

LETSI's activities have focused on a next-generation learning interoperability framework to succeed the current generation -- SCORM and similar "portable content" frameworks. In June 2008, LETSI undertook an open solicitation of ideas about "SCORM 2.0" and recieved over 100 white papers, which were posted and discussed online, ultimately leading up to a face to face meeting in Pensacola, Florida, in October 2008. Those looking for a good starting point for understanding the scope of LETSI's work are encouraged to review the resulting report, LETSI's Assumptions Document, drafted by four working groups formed at the Pensacola meeting and published in February, 2009.

Two recent white papers, LETSI's position statement on the future of the CMI standard and Beyond Content Portability, discuss the limitations of today's elearning systems and the problem that LETSI has set out to solve -- accelerating the adoption of elearning innovations (immersive, intelligent, collaborative, mobile, ...). A web-hosted approach to elearning activities is the solution. Separating the content management and delivery function of the enterprise LMS from its administrative role (rosters, gradebooks, entitlement management, ...) allows the easy integration of new kinds of learning websites and mobile apps for students, teachers, and parents. New protocols for secure transmission of data about activities, students, entitlements, and performance are required. The papers outline LETSI's incremental approach:

1. Identifying market-confounding issues, like web-hosted content, entitlements, or scoring; 
2. Convening open, focused, short-term working groups;
3. Reviewing related activity in other organizations across market sectors (K-12, higher-ed, corporate, military, professional certification);
4. Using abstraction and extension mechanisms in our data models to allow communities of practice maximal flexibility while still dramatically reducing the cost of creating interoperable systems;
5. Agile development and testing of tools for software implementers; and 
6. Free, unencumbered access to documentation, sample code, and open-source tools on our wiki.

The following working groups meet weekly:

LET Activity Description is taking a fresh look at issues of aggregation, disaggregation, abstraction, and behavior, with both LMS-driven and Internet-based learning activities in mind. Chairs: Tyde Richards and Crispin Weston.

Content as a Service is focused on commercial publication of web-hosted learning activities. Working on conceptual models for entitlement data and catalog of purchased items.   Chairs: Ed Cohen, Frank Polster.

Namesets and Common Memory will develop a service-oriented approach to sharing data across students, sessions, and activities. Jointly with the AICC.  First meeting TBD. Chair: Fred Banks.

Architecture - The Architecture WG is currently focused on software technology issues: web services, security, identity, semantics, etc. Resolution of the specific technical issues that emerge in the other LETSI working groups will eventually lead to an open, service-oriented architecture for data exchange among web-based learning activities and a variety of applications for students, teachers, and administrators. Chair: Chris Sawwa.

Runtime Web Services - This working group is wrapping up their first phase of work, which produced a spec for transmitting SCORM data securely across the web. It is being used to demonstrate the integration of stand-alone training systems (simulations, games, mobile) with installed learning management systems. A Developer's Guide and sample code are available for early adopters. Chair: Mike Rustici.

Joint CMI Study Group (with the IEEE LTSC, ADL, AICC, and SIFA) - This joint effort continues currently in Working Group 11 of the IEEE LTSC. One objective is to find a common data model for the proposed replacements to today's AICC and SCORM standards, which currently share components of the CMI data model, originally developed by the AICC and now IEEE Standard 1484.11.1. See LETSI's CMI Position Paper. Chair: Tyde Richards.