Notes from a Meeting with Charles Leonhardt

Georgetown University, September 3, 2004

September 3, 2004

Charlie Leonhardt is Principal Technologist, University Information Services at Georgetown University, Washington, DC and a representative to the Sakai Educational Partners Program.

I met with Charlie Leonhardt at Georgetown University as another opportunity to learn what Sakai partners expect from the project and program, and his suggestions for future direction.

Charlie was very clear about his objectives for Georgetown’s participation in the Sakai educational Partners Program (SEPP). He wants to further interoperability between the Learning Management System and the student system. He wants functional modularity.

When he describes integration, he wants each major function common to two or more enterprise systems to be independent and used by all systems. He cites directory and authentication and authorization services as examples. He would prefer interoperability be based on broad industry acceptance and implementation of open standards. The goal would be widely implemented open standards applicable to postsecondary education.

For example, he wants to go beyond “Eduperson 1.0” to standards that would provide a list of courses the student is currently enrolled. He wants to standardize the protocols and data exchanges between major systems or major components. He sees the Sakai “Tool Portability” as one route towards his objectives. He described Sakai as “a noble effort,” and wants to contribute.

In order to achieve “broad implementation,” it will be necessary to have the participation of both open source and commercial software suppliers. As an early and active participant in the Blackboard Learning Management System community, he feels he understands and respects the motivations and capabilities of both the commercial and open source software suppliers. Georgetown University was an early and successful user of Blackboard.

He had received a copy of Blackboard’s initial proposal to Sakai for participation in the Sakai Commercial Affiliates program, understands the Sakai Board’s reason for limiting commercial participation, and received Blackboard Chairman Matt Pittinsky’s e-mail to those who were both Blackboard customers and SEPP members. He commented he had hoped that Blackboard and other LMS software suppliers could have been accommodate with some level of participation in Sakai.

He was aware of the proposed IMS Workgroup may provide an opportunity for Sakai and commercial firms (and others) to work together. However, history does not suggest IMS can move implementation forward quickly; the more a specification, profile, or “best practice” affects, the slower the process seems to be.

We briefly discussed JISC’s (UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee) success in testing interoperability as a way to ensure understanding. These interoperability tests have improved portability and integration. Charlie would like to see a broader and more continuous effort in testing interoperability.

Charlie is considering the need for an “interoperability laboratory” that could be used to continuously test and improve interoperability, and to give colleges and universities a source of comparative information about learning and research software and content. As he is beginning to develop the idea, this laboratory becomes the “real world” for software integration.

I suggested that he may want to consider a partnership with the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council since they now have workgroups with a record of accomplishing interoperability of administrative processes among groups of colleges and universities. And he may want to partner with the University of Hull since they are bringing the JSR 168 and WSRP standards to existing software.[1]

As I interpret his remarks, Charlie is more concerned about achieving interoperability than a schedule for the immediate availability of Sakai software itself.

He will be meeting with Carl Jacobson at the next Common Solutions Group. This may be an opportunity for the Sakai Board to get another perspective of Charlie's interests.

Jim Farmer14 September 2004

Reviewed without change 15 December 2004

[1] Note this is similar to CampusEAI where the central organization redevelops software written by the members using the CampusEAI profile for open standards. This “tested” software then is available for redistribution to others. With this model developers need not be fully aware of the details of a specification, or delayed by lack of understanding.