Industry Weighs WebCT Open Knowledge Demonstration
WebCT has prototyped an application that uses the Open Knowledge
Initiative (OKI) Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) for
interoperability among higher education applications. OKI
seeks to provide simple integration with existing infrastructure, encourage
local innovations that can be shared across campuses or universities,
and facilitate adaptation to new technologies without destabilizing the
overall environment.
In the demonstration, the WebCT Vista academic enterprise system
automatically synchronized calendars with Microsoft Outlook using
the OKI authentication and scheduling OSIDs, or APIs, to exchange data.
This would enable both calendars to be simultaneously updated by
updating one.
"We welcome and applaud WebCT's initiative in using OKI's services,"
said Dr. Vijay Kumar, OKI's principal investigator and MIT's assistant
provost. "The tangible and early participation of a company such as
WebCT is an important indicator of OKI's significance for industry as well as
a good model for industry's critical role in advancing open interoperability
efforts."
Scott Leslie, an educational technology researcher and emerging
technology analyst, who works on the Edutools.info project researching
course management systems, said, "This probably d'esn't seem like much
but in theory the promise held by OKI OSID support is much greater. If such
support were to be found in even a couple of the major CMS players (as well
as one or two viable open source projects,) the barrier to entry for
discipline-specific or pedagogic-specific application developers suddenly
gets much lower, as they can focus on their applications core functionality
and not on re-building it to work with each of the different proprietary APIs."
Edward Walker, chief executive officer of the IMS Global Learning
Consortium, said, "Early adoption of next-generation, open, eLearning
specifications is an important contribution. Implementations such as
WebCT's stimulate collaboration and real-world feedback, which helps the
specifications evolve to better meet consumers' needs."