M.D. Lytras et al. (Eds.): WSKS 2009, LNAI 5736, pp. 286–295, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 Interoperability for LMS: The Missing Piece to Become the Common Place for Elearning Innovation Marc Alier Forment 1 , María José Casañ Guerrero 1 , Miguel Ángel Conde González 2 , Francisco José García Peñalvo 2 , and Charles Severance 3 1 Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, c/Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain {malier,mjcasany}@lsi.upc.edu 2 Universidad de Salamanca, Plaza de los caídos S/N. 37008, Salamanca, Spain {mconde,fgarcia}@usal.es 3 University of Michigan {csev}@umich.edu Abstract. This paper speculates about the future of LMSs considering the up- coming new learning applications and technologies, and the different attitudes of learners and teachers, given their technological background described using the digital natives and immigrants metaphor. Interoperability is not just a nice to have feature, but a must have features for LMS if these systems are going to be the common place where the ICT empowered learning innovation happens. Af- ter analyzing 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. Keywords: Elearning, Web 2.0, Mobile Learning, Interoperability, LMS. 1 Introduction 1.1 The LMS, the Dinosaur and the Meteor ELearning has experienced an extraordinary growth over the last years, learning para- digms; technological solutions, methods and pedagogical approaches have been developed, discarded and adopted. We have reached a point in time when most of learning institutions have adopted the use of Learning Management System (LMS) software, either from commercial vendors or Free Open Source Communities. LMS have reached the balance to meet the structure and (traditional) ways of schools, universities and other educational institutions. As Dr Charles Severance [1] (founder of the Open Source LMS Sakai and cur- rently working for IMS) states: LMS “are all mature enough that the majority of faculties and student users are generally satisfied regardless of which system cho- sen”. It seems that LMS systems have achieved a stability and maturity, a Golden Age of LMS; LMS adopt each other's features and are slowly beginning to look like clones of one another. Severance wonders if this stable ecosystem of LMS is waiting to