Blogs
March, 2021 About a decade and a half ago, I was on the front lines delivering integrated education ecosystems. Mostly this was connecting publisher platforms to learning tools (today we’d call this connecting “learning companies” to “EdTechs”). In my team’s onboarding slide deck, we used a graphic of a plate of spaghetti as a visual representation of what integration ecosystems look like without standards. The visual illustrated the chaos that ensues when you create custom connections between and among each LMS, Courseware platform, and EdTech product. The ecosystem eventually achieves all the connections, but becomes a tangled mess in the process. Caught up in this tangle is onerous...
March, 2021 When Robert M. Gagne published The Conditions of Learning, he may not have realized that his desire to find better ways to teach people would blossom into the field we know as Instructional Design. Today, there are many different instructional design theories, models, and approaches that you can use. In fact, you may find that some firms adhere strictly to one instructional design model.
March, 2021 InCommon is a widely used federation in Higher Education. They have recently created the Metadata Distribution Query service and protocol (MDQ). The benefits of this new service are numerous. At Unicon we’ve seen clients experience half the memory usage in popular open source Single Sign On applications such as Shibboleth Identity Provider and Apereo CAS server after switching.
March, 2021 For the past two hours you’ve been testing a customer’s LMS integration, and it just keeps failing. You’ve looked at the configuration and your own system logs; you’ve tried different user roles and link placements - it all fails. You go back and look at the LMS configuration one more time and notice some whitespace at the end of a configuration parameter. You remove the white space, save the configuration change, try the integration again, and (boom) it works. If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably asked yourself this question: why is customer onboarding, especially with respect to IMS Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI®) integrations, so difficult?With the evolution of the IMS...
February, 2021 I remember long car rides on summer vacation with my parents where my mom was in the front seat with a large map on her lap helping my dad navigate through new cities and towns.
January, 2021 InCommon is a widely used single sign-on federation in Higher Education. It has recently created the Metadata Distribution Query service and protocol (MDQ). The benefits of this new service are numerous. At Unicon, we’ve seen clients experience half the memory usage in popular open source single sign-on applications such as Shibboleth Identity Provider and Apereo CAS server after switching.
December, 2020 At Unicon, we help many institutions and enterprises develop and implement their data analytics strategy. A question we get often is “what is a data lake?,” and “how does it differ from a data warehouse?”
November, 2020 On Thursday, October 15, 2020, the Unicon Open Source Support (OSS) team held the openEQUELLA OSS Briefing summarizing OSS activities for Q2 and Q3 of 2020.The openEQUELLA OSS Periodic Briefing is an opportunity to share the contributions performed by Unicon on behalf of the OSS program, highlight Unicon's perspective on contributions, share happenings in the community, and describe opportunities to engage further with Unicon.
October, 2020 CanvasCon 2020 Online last week was one of the first virtual conferences I had done since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
October, 2020 Fairly or unfairly, people remember their first impressions.