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

August 31, 2010

LETSI is an international organization focused on accelerating innovation in educational technology by enabling the open exchange of data among systems, current and future:

• Offer immersive, mobile, and collaborative learning activities for individuals and teams (both commercial and free; available on popular devices; communicate 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 grade.
• 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.

Our approach involves:

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);
4. Using abstraction and extension mechanisms in our data models to allow communities of practice maximal flexibility while still dramatically reducing the cost of interoperability;
5. Agile development, implementation, and testing of software; and 
6. Free, unencumbered access to documentation, sample code, and open-source tools on our wiki.

Several new working groups are forming:

LET Activity Description will a fresh look at issues of aggregation, disaggregation, abstraction, and behavior, with both LMS-driven and Internet-based learning activities in mind. First meeting online, August 24th, 11:00am Eastern. Chairs: Tyde Richards and Crispin Weston.

Content as a Service will focus on commercial publication of web-hosted learning activities towards conceptual models for entitlement data and catalog of purchased items. First meeting on the second day of the AICC meeting in Washington, September 8th, and online, time TBD.  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 at the AICC meeting in Washington, September 8th and online, time TBD. Chair: Fred Banks.

Architecture - Starting September 16, the Architecture WG will focus on software technology issues: web services, security, identity, semantics, etc. We will review the lessons learned and "out of scope" issues from RTWS Phase 1 as well as the technical decisions taken by other organizations. 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.

All LETSI Working Groups are open and visitors are welcome, including the monthly Technical Roadmap Committee meetings, where we review all working group activities.

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This work is supported by LETSI's sponsors:

• The IEEE Computer Society
• The Korean IT Promotion Agency
• Meridian Knowledge Systems, Inc.
• Outstart, Inc.