LMS Portlet

LMS Portlet Overview

Offering a learning management portlet would be valuable to the uPortal community and generally support the role of uPortal as an academic product. This portlet might be build as a generic LMS portlet with connectors to common LMSs such as Sakai and Blackboard. Keeping the interface generic would allow for user interface re-use, better allow us to maintain integrations for multiple versions of our supported LMS products, and generally be consisted with Jasig best practices.

It would be highly desirable to ensure this portlet supports multiple LMS products at the same time, rather than being able to only be configured against a single LMS. Many schools use more than one LMS product, and individual students may have courses that use more than one product.

LMS Data requirements

• Class schedule
• Deep-links to courses
• Synoptic summary
  • News
  • Discussions
• Due date reminders
• Library integration?
• Map integration
• Bookstore

Support for projects as well as courses

Current Example LMS Integration Portlets

• Unicon "My Courses" Portlet
• University of Manchester Blackboard Portlet

Screenshot of the Manchester Blackboard Portlet	Screenshot of the Unicon My Courses Portlet

LMS Implementation Notes

Sakai

Sakai ships with an Entity Broker service that provides REST service targets. This service might be a good first choice for an LMS portlet integration. It does include announcements search capability.

An alternative strategy might involve using Sakai's sdata service.