Higher Educational APIs

What it is About

LMS (Learning Management System) is a digital learning environment that manages all aspects of a company’s various training efforts such as administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs. It is designed to identify training and learning gaps, utilizing analytical data and reporting.

The majority of the LMSs today focus on the corporate market and make up the largest segment of the learning system market. They are focused on online learning delivery but support a range of uses, acting as a platform for online content, including courses, both asynchronous based and synchronous based. HR teams and training and development specialists use LMS environments to maintain all types of eLearning courses and track completions and results. They can also track learners’ progress.

However, the world of online learning goes way beyond the LMS. There are other parts of the learning infrastructure that are being handled by other systems. In order to promote ease of use and engagement, it’s essential that an LMS can integrate easily with other systems to make sure the organization is ready for the world of digital learning--provide the best user experience and increase business performance.

APIs (Application Program Interface) are the key to putting everything together by acting as a bridge to transfer data between applications by allowing for the push and pull of automated communication. It is through APIs that the future of contextually relevant learning delivered in the right place at the right time becomes a real possibility.

Bit of History

While working in the higher education industry over past years, we worked very closely with many learning management systems to improve student's learning experience. It is vital to be fluent in the REST APIs of learning management systems(LMS) as well as student information systems(SIS) to make sure academic data synchronized smoothly throughout the eco-system.

We also realized the developer journey to setup/configure these APIs are not straightforward. Exploring the APIs, trying the responses consumed significant amount of time.

In a Nutshell

We created this public workspace where we host API collections of most famous Learning Management Systems to perform any integration related to managing user accounts, courses and training materials, enrolling users, statistics, and much more. It includes requirements, sample JSON, request parameters, and response messages organized to allow the community of engineers to easily use, re-use and share using Postman.

Developers will be able to fork/download these collections and start exploring quickly while saving valuable time for their products/integrations.

Putting things together

Even though the concept here is simple, the work to putting all pieces together was less straightforward. We had to create the Canvas APIs requests, Samples manually to the collection. Thanks to Postman, the interface is truly awesomely friendly - we were able to build the collections quickly. The Canvas does not have a OAS or RAML API specification - though they have JSON based documentation for each endpoint separately. (We tried to write a script to bring all endpoint documentations together and build OAS spec, but had to leave it as it consumes significant amount of time)

Once the collections are set, rest was easy. To add the helpful links, documentations, enable mocking servers, creating environments were quickly achievable in the workspace builder.

Built With

• api
• postman
• postman-hackathon
• restful-api