Interoperability for LMS: the missing piece to become the common place for e-learning innovation

Abstract

This paper speculates about the future of LMSs considering the upcoming new learning applications and technologies, and the different attitudes of learners and teachers, given their technological background described using the digital natives and immigrant's metaphor. Interoperability is not just a nice feature to have, but a must have feature for LMS if these systems are going to be the common place where the ICT empowered learning innovation happens. After analysing some standards and initiatives related to interoperability on LMS, the authors present an overview of the architecture for interoperability they propose. This architecture is being implemented for the well known open source LMS Moodle.