1. Caliper Event Integration Blackboard Learn & Kaltura Video Platform
Dan Rinzel, Senior Product Manager Blackboard
Jeff Rubenstein, Vice President
Product Kaltura
IMS Global Learning Consortium Learning Impact Leadership Institute
May 2016

2. Agenda Project goals & development process
Spec maturity & lessons learned from the leading edge
Demonstration
Key takeaways

3. Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.

4. The Challenge
Lots of Data
Currently accessible only through Kaltura

5. The Goal
Integrated insights for teachers into what students are doing across tools and experiences
Usage data first, progress data to come

6. Project Goals
Overall Goal: prove out event interoperability between a launch system and a tool provider.
Leverage existing event instrumentation (native or Caliper) in both systems
Send instrumented events from the tool provider, including metric profile events not “known” to the launch system
Leverage existing integration mechanics between systems, including LTI
Extend the LTI launch handshake in the existing B2 securely to include Caliper semantics
Leverage existing event capabilities in the launch system
Integrate events correctly alongside “native” events in the launch system
Use the launch system as (interim or final) Caliper LRS
Mostly looking for the smallest practical delta between what we’re already doing in our separate data silos and what we could be doing with Caliper 1.0 spec
Blackboard Learn SaaS certfied last July against the pre-release of the spec, and again in Octoober with the 1.0 release, for the metric profiles
Assessment Event Assessment Item Event AssignableEvent Outcome Event Session Event
Kaltura Application Framework also certified in October with the 1.0 release for the MediaEvent metric profile

7. Development Process
Lightweight internal milestone deliverables (by month or quarter) – best fit with mainline dev schedules on both sides
DevOps coordination of Test/Dev systems for integration testing
Periodic check-in status meetings & threads for real work
Complexity was largely around fitting this project into other planned work with minimal disruption to schedule

8. Spec maturity and workarounds
Caliper’s third actor – the Learning Record Store is neither a tool consumer nor a tool provider, but could have capabilities of either/both
Complicates relays between potential event “receivers”
Preserving identifiers from the launch system is not mandated
Object life cycles on the launch system and the tool could impact the record store
Event payload size and the describe operation
Group membership and contextual relevance
The relay thing is largely just on Blackboard side, but could also impact Kaltura sending events to a 3rd party event receiver directly
We’ve worked around identifier preservation for this effort using object extensions, but that’s because we could negotiate specifics out-of-band during the co-development project
If the launch system is responsible for responding to describe requests, how will we manage life cycle operations (removed/updated users or courses, for example)
Sometimes the *current* group membership is critical to provide for some events (such as group assignment submission). We used extensions for this as well, but that’s not great for interoperability

9. xAPI
Both Blackboard & Kaltura take the position that we don’t want customers to feel locked in to making tool choices or Learning Record Store choices based on which event syntax is supported, but we’d also strongly prefer not to have to maintain two separate mapping libraries. A convergence here in xAPI and Caliper will make it easier on everyone in the ecosystem

10. Demonstration

11. Today and Future - Kaltura
Today: Media Metric Profile
Next: Assessment Metric Profile
Other parameters

12. Today and Future - Blackboard
Today: Caliper event collection & relay
Next: Enterprise Learn deployment support, Discussion profile
Next next: xAPI support

13. Key Takeaways
Co-development against the spec for systems already instrumented for events is largely enabling the correct handshake and mapping/ transforming event syntax
Metric profiles and object extensions provide a great mechanism to support workarounds to enable success between any two systems
The context identifiers matter, and are not uniform across system boundaries
Some level of interoperability between Caliper & xAPI is highly desirable to avoid competing event ecosystems, but which actor’s responsibility is it?

14. Thank You! Dan Rinzel Senior Product Manager Jeff Rubenstein
for Blackboard
Jeff Rubenstein
VP, Product Development
Kaltura, Inc

15. Configuring Learn SaaS to relay events to an external Caliper record store

16. Enabling the Caliper “handshake” between Learn and an LTI Tool
New bb-manifest.xml permission block
<permission type="blackboard.platform.blti.CaliperProfileCallbackPermission" name="*" actions="*"/></permissions>