Category Archives: K-12 Schools

Application to the K-12 or schools segment

Is an institutional version of an educational “app store” in your future?

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We hope so! And we hope many universities, school districts and suppliers will collaborate on developing it!

See today’s announcement about the launch of a new collaboration to do just that.

Well, we know that the higher ed market seems to want to keep talking about the LMS, last week’s announcement from MIT and Stanford not withstanding. But, some of us are moving on. For those of us that have been attending Learning Impact the last several years (and, yes, don’t forget to sign up right now for this year’s because space is getting short!), we already know what the future of the “LMS” is (and that the term LMS is a bad name for what it has been or what it will be).  We also know what the general roadmap for digital learning resources is and how this evolution is intertwined with the evolution of the LMS. That’s because the LMS is evolving into a disaggregation of features and resources that come together easily and seamlessly for the needs of teachers and students.

The last few years have popularized, in the consumer world, the app store model. The app store in the consumer context is as much, or more, about controlling purchasing paths and revenue distribution as it is about software that the user interacts with (like iTunes). I have about eight Apple computers in my home and have been a user of Apple since the Lisa. What a stroke of genius Steve Jobs had in envisioning Apple computers at the center of home entertainment/personal digital lifestyle! And, iTunes was the delivery mechanism to make getting the digital resources easy. And, as we know, the 1-click buying, downloading, installing experience has evolved from computer to mobile devices of all shapes and sizes. Hooray!

Success of this model has lead to a lot of imitation by other large consumer-oriented companies and creating similarly vertically integrated buying experiences. To succeed at this you’ve got to have a massive point of sale presence. Amazon became the leader in e-Books. And, Google has the primary competitor to iTunes for mobile devices.

Ease of use/convenience in getting digital resources, evolving to the very popular apps (software applications) has made these vertical stores very appealing. Problem is that they also tend to lock the buyer in to a specific device or family of devices. If I want to switch from iPhone to Samsung Galaxy Note II – which I recently did – I have to start over again with the apps (Yes, the Galaxy Note II is a much better phone than the iPhone – sorry Apple!).

Of course, there are now mobile applications focused on the education segment: as our friend Robbie Kendall Melton from Tennessee Board of Regents has probably the best collection! Problem is that these vertical app stores have created a nightmare for teachers and students who generally need something that cut across many different types of devices (think BYOT). And, in order to make the user experience seamless and productive, educational apps typically require exchange of information (think user data and/or analytics) with other software in the educational enterprise (yes, like an LMS or whatever the LMS evolves to).

So, IMS finds ourselves in an interesting position in that we are going to need to enable a model in education that is not Apple, Google, Amazon (or any proprietary vertical marketplace approach) centric.  The app store project is, at it’s beginning, a collection of universities that are working to define and build a reference implementation of an app store based on open standards, that any content provider can participate in.  The advantage of building apps that utilize the open standards (think APIs – but vendor neutral) is that they will be easily integrated into a seamless teacher and student experience (yes, think 1-click). Now, will it be a gigantic app store with zillions of resources? Probably a smaller set of resources that are much more manageable for each course (while some are in love with the “learning objects in the sky” concept it is not what most faculty have time for).

The IMS educational app store project is in a top-level design phase now – with the expectation that there will be mock-ups and wireframes to discuss at the upcoming Learning Impact. From there we will herd the cats and begin building. The idea is NOT that IMS would maintain some sort of app store.  The idea is that institutions and/or suppliers will collaborate as they see fit in providing institutional or supplier-specific versions that may or may not be coordinated with peer implementations. Contact us if you’d like to get involved.

Briefly back to Apple, Amazon, Google – sorry to have to pick on you guys. But, for education it’s time to move to the next logical phase of the app store concept. The good news is that you can utilize the open app store APIs (or others can) to link the proprietary applications built for your stores into the open educational app store should the educational community wish to do so. It would be much nicer if you would spend a little bit of time and effort to engage or even contribute to the project – but we realize you are very busy making money with your vertical platform strategies and probably won’t help out the education segment.

IMSappstore

 

Big data: Cool; Small data: Cooler

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An LTI-based prototype for a Student Progress Dashboard

At the last IMS quarterly meeting in February 2013 at Lone Star College in Houston we spent a lot of time on analytics. Analytics is a pretty hot topic in education these days. In fact, in HED the hype has been off the charts for about two years now. At EDUCAUSE 2011 analytics was the savior, At EDUCAUSE 2012 the hype was more muted – but still strong.

Why? Economics. Retaining one student is worth substantial dollars. Retaining many = mucho dollars. Not to mention national goals for graduating more students – which has a broader impact on any national economy as the delta in wages over a lifetime is large between degreed and non-degreed people.

One of the problems with the term analytics is that it is VERY broad. At our quarterly meeting we had a parade of companies (large & small) as well as very well-informed individuals working in the analytics field.  We learned that there are at least three levels of analytics applicable to education:

  1. Learning analytics: Data analysis that helps students improve learning outcomes.
  2. Academic/program analytics: Data analysis that provides information of what is happening in a specific program and how to plug holes or otherwise adjust.
  3. Institutional analytics: Data analysis that helps make decisions about how to improve at the institutional level.

There is also a fourth level – an even higher level at which governments might crunch numbers to understand a statewide or national level. Since we don’t consider ourselves to be part of the government in IMS, this fourth level is not too interesting to us.

There are some great companies doing some great work in analytics. Companies like Oracle, Desire2Learn, LoudCloud, McGraw-Hill and Civitas Learning – all of whom presented at the IMS quarterly.

And, of course one of the things we have learned previously about domain-specific adaptive tutor/homework applications, like Pearson My-Labs, is that they can make use of data collected across many institutions.

The use of analytics to crunch, and potentially correlate, data from what might not appear to be related things, has appeal to many. For instance, one of the claims made by the CEO of Knewton at the U.S. Whitehouse Data Palooza event last year was that the Knewton product would be able to predict how well a student would do based on what they had to eat for breakfast! That sort of data would be very interesting to Frosted Mini-Wheats, as well as some parents.

Crunching large amounts of data from many sources and then figuring out which data is most useful/predictive is often referred to as making use of “Big Data.”

But, there is also “Small Data.” Small data tends to be more localized, and perhaps, immediately actionable (see non-education article on Why Small Data May be Bigger than Big Data). As Mark Milliron said at Learning Impact 2011, “Students are good with collecting data on them if it can actually help them as individuals.”  This makes a lot of sense to us at IMS.

Now, of course, data interoperability can potentially aid analytics because agreed upon data definitions used across many tools/products should be easier to compare. Analytics is a really important focus area for IMS – and will be a key focus at this year’s Learning Impact 2013 conference May 13-16 in San Diego.

The sort of “holy grail” of data interoperability is an agreed upon “learning/progress map” that all tools and assessments could populate. Some are working on that very issue today (see for instance the Dynamic Learning Maps collaborative that is participating in IMS via CETE at University of Kansas). However, while it is relatively straightforward to agree on some types of data – like for instance assessment item results data as in QTI/APIP or usage data on things like e-books – the state of the market is that student learning models and data is in its infancy. Therefore, many tools will be producing analytics information that makes sense within the tool, but not more generally. IMS wants to put in place standards that encourage that type of innovation through variability, as well as the type of standards that capture things everyone can agree on.

To enable more use of small data in education, it occurred to us that it would be very cool if it was easier for students or teachers to simply see all of the progress data in one place – even though the tools are all separate. What a major step forward it would be for a student to work in several tools and be able to see how their results compared. So, we decided to see if LTI could be used to enable a Student Progress Dashboard that is a mash-up of many dashboards from independent tools. We see such a dashboard as displaying the unique analytics capabilities of any tool – whether or not data definitions are agreed to – and, whether or not the tool provider is willing to share such data. We think this very simple idea is empowering and will complement the progress we are making on defining agreed data fields when we can.

And, now we have a very simple prototype to show one version of the concept – using tools that are not especially analytical in nature – but ones we had lying around.  If you go to this screencast by Stephen Vickers you will see the very first IMS-enabled Student Progress Dashboard prototype. We expect this to be a standard feature to be supported in LTI going forward and want to see lots of riffing on this in the LTI community! Let us know what you think! And, tool providers, start your engines!

Note that we may not be able to tell how well a student will perform based on what they had for breakfast, as perhaps Knewton can, but, we can perhaps make a combination of tools – tools available today – more actionable for students or teachers!

Student_Progress_Dashboard_Prototype

IMS LTI-Enabled Student Progress Dashboard Prototype

Letter from the IMS Chairman and the IMS CEO

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This post is the letter to IMS stakeholders contained in the recently released IMS Global Annual Report for 2012: Leading the Digital Innovation Revolution in Education . Join us at the Learning Impact conference, May 13-16 in San Diego to provide your leadership to the cause!

IMS_digital_revolution

Dear Supporters of IMS Global,

We are pleased to present the IMS annual report for calendar and fiscal year 2012. Maturity and adoption of IMS interoperability standards reached record levels in 2012. This support from the IMS community resulted in record levels of revenue, membership and net assets, as shown in the accompanying chart.

IMS_trends

Over the last 15 years, education has adopted many “point” examples of innovation in which technology has played an enabling role. Today’s “hottest” innovation is the MOOC (Massively Open Online Course). Will it be another point innovation or, instead, an educational paradigm “shifter?” Neither is certain, but we are certain that the least risky strategy for scaling up educational opportunity while affordably improving learning outcomes is to tap into the inexorable march of technical innovation. For this strategy to succeed, institutions must be free to select innovative applications from a variety of sources and integrate the resulting foundation of new and legacy applications. The need for agile integration and interoperability has never been higher and, thus, IMS standards and certification never more strategic.

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The goal of the IMS work is to enable innovation through a broadly affordable, vendor-neutral open “platform” – owned by none and implemented by all. IMS open interoperability permits the systemic integration of applications from diverse sources into a seamless, agile and information-rich educational experience, within the institution and across the Internet through its partners and suppliers. MOOCs are but one current example of an innovation that draws on the leverage inherent in IMS open interoperability.

In 2012 the IMS community provided overwhelming evidence that open interoperability can provide a cost and time savings on the order of 10-100x, compared to current, widely used integration approaches. These benefits accrue to suppliers and institutions, all while enabling a more seamless, and thus more productive technology experience for students and faculty.

IMS launched the “Open Digital Innovation Revolution” campaign at EDUCAUSE 2012 to highlight that systemic change enabled by open interoperability can have revolutionary consequences in terms of the rate of adoption of innovative digital content and applications. Moving into 2013, IMS is accordingly focused on Open Digital Innovation as a core strategy upon which to build the education markets of the future. Indeed, an emboldened breed of leadership is already emerging from the IMS community of suppliers and institutions. These bold, but practical leaders seek to amplify the value proposition of an open interoperable core platform as a means to shift today’s education paradigm towards future learning needs. The IMS board and organization are grateful to these bold leaders, who are truly leading the scalable and sustainable future of education!

Rob Abel, Ed.D., Chief Executive Officer

William H. Graves, Ph.D., Chairman of the Board

Evolving to digital curriculum based on open interoperability standards, Part III

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Investing in a Digital Curriculum Evolution Strategy

In part I of this series, Introduction to the spectrum of approaches to evolving to digital curriculum that we are seeing in the marketplace, we described 5 potential benefits of evolving to digital curriculum. We also described a spectrum of approaches that we are seeing in the marketplace to moving the needle to more digital options for teachers and students.

In part II, The Importance of Interoperability in Achieving the Potential Advantages of Digital Curriculum, we described in more detail the importance of interoperability standards in achieving the 5 potential benefits of digital curriculum. The net-net being that unless evolution to digital is based on widely adopted interoperability standards that the digital future is not clearly better than the paper textbook world of today. It may be more fun – but it won’t be better in terms of actually achieving the potential advantages of digital curriculum or evolving to more effective instruction. To help districts and states evolve to digital curriculum and associated delivery platforms based on open interoperability standards, IMS has published a policy note providing RFP language guidance for digital applications and content: Open-Standards Requirements for Digital Content and Application Integration with Enterprise Learning Platforms.

In this part III we’d like to circle back to the spectrum of approaches to digital evolution discussed in part I looking through the lens of “What strategy is going to give most bang for the buck both near term and longer term?” After all, every step that a state authority or local authority takes is an investment of precious time and resources – which cannot afford to be wasted. The spectrum is visualized in the following diagram:

 

Each of the three strategies that are illustrated along the spectrum has their strengths and weaknesses, summarized here:

Strategy Major Strength Major Weakness
PDF or e-texts versions of books Potential for cost reduction while retaining familiar textbook model of instruction Lack of innovation, personalization and interactivity
Digital curriculum toolkit Puts onus on digital curriculum suppliers to provide coherent collections of digital assets that are teacher/student friendly Requires evolution to teaching, learning and institutional processes that enable personalized and experiential learning to obtain full benefit
Digital learning objects in the sky Google search is already what everyone does in all aspects of life, why not education? Difficult/time consuming to achieve coherence of instructional materials or the instructional experience

What strategy makes the most sense?  Well, the reality is that all three strategies are going to occur just because they are all options that are out there.  However, we think there is an obvious better choice both now and into the foreseeable future – and that is the “digital curriculum toolkit” strategy.

Why does the digital curriculum toolkit strategy make the most sense? The digital curriculum toolkit is the only strategy that attempts to improve instruction in a realistic manner. Why?

  1. It is much more likely that coherent digital curriculum that can be personalized will come through a combination of working with trusted suppliers/sources combined with institutional created content (noting that his latter category may include some of what comes from the Learning Objects in the Sky).
  2. As discussed in Part II actually achieving the 5 potential advantage/benefits of evolving to digital curriculum requires going substantially beyond the “PDF or e-text versions of books” strategy (even though some resources of those types could clearly become part of the digital curriculum toolkit strategy).
  3. The digital curriculum toolkit strategy seems to fit the “way institutions/states in K-12 do business” in terms of working with trusted providers and taking responsibility for curriculum (albeit that as noted in the above table, to achieve full benefit a concerted effort to evolve instruction to more personalized and experiential models will be required).

If you are in the U.S. you are seeing a huge amount of investment from the Gates Foundation, CCSSO and the U.S. Department of Education in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). So, it might be natural to ask,

“Won’t the Common Core provide the glue that will enable any and all of the three strategies?”

To this we would answer that we are hopeful that it might help, but realistically it is not going to be the panacea that everyone is hoping for. Here are the reasons why the Common Core will not radically change things:

  1. No one can be sure that the Common Core will work. There is already a huge amount of deviation occurring and, some are saying that it is not implementable.
  2. The Common Core, while potentially a positive step for U.S. education, is at best still a “driving while looking in the rear view mirror” approach to educational reform (the Common Core approach largely copies what some other countries have been doing for years).
  3. One can make a very good case that to fully actualize the goals of the Common Core that instruction must be radically evolved to a much more interdisciplinary, experiential approach to learning – and in doing so the Common Core (or any agreed upon set of learning standards for math and language) becomes a relatively small (while potentially important) part of the solution.

To that 3rd point, the IMS Instructional Innovation through Interoperability Leadership Council (I3LC) of school districts and states has recently published a position paper that attempts to put some of the myriad projects and investments made in the last few years in the U.S. by the Gates Foundation into perspective. These initiatives include the Learning Registry (initially funded by the U.S. government, later by Gates), LRMI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) and SLC (Shared Learning Collaborative), now InBloom. These projects all share the notion that learning objects or progress can be referenced back to a common set of educational standards, and are generally complimentary, and perhaps even dependent upon success of the Common Core.

The I3LC paper is entitled, “Efficient and Descriptive Learning Object Metadata: An Essential Component of K12 Instructional Reform,” and is one of a new series of “Application and Policy Briefs” from IMS.

The paper may be viewed as controversial in some circles because it clearly concludes that despite the huge investments from the Gates Foundation in the combined set of projects that they will not enable districts to support evolution to effective instructional reform. In the terms of this blog series, this is because the Gates investments are largely focused on enabling the “learning objects in the sky” strategy. While those investments may indeed help lead the way to enabling that alternative – in which case the Gates Foundation can point to a meaningful contribution – they are not focused on the most relevant strategy: the digital curriculum toolkit.

That’s the potentially “bad news.” The potentially “good news” is that organizations such as IMS can work pragmatically across the membership to help “bridge” these strategies. Metadata and federated search are great examples of areas in which the IMS membership will be working pragmatically to make the various marketplace pieces fit.  What pieces need to fit? Here is a diagram excerpted from the position paper.

Stay tuned!

 

Evolving to digital curriculum based on open interoperability standards, Part II

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The Importance of Interoperability in Achieving the Potential Advantages of Digital Curriculum

In part I of this blog series on Evolving to Digital Curriculum we covered five potential benefits of digital materials and the spectrum of approaches we are seeing in the marketplace for enabling more digital options for teachers and students.

In part II we will address the roles and importance of interoperability standards in the evolution to digital curriculum. We also discuss a common sense ordering of “putting standards in place” based on feedback from the market.

Now, when we say “standard” we could mean a lot of things, as standards in their best sense mean a voluntary collaboration among education community participants on the technical approach to interoperability as well as a fair/neutral decision-making process. However, the following paragraphs are just as relevant if what we mean by an interoperability standard is one agreed upon way for two applications to exchange information necessary for those applications to work together in well-defined way (in comparison to multiple and diverse ways to accomplish essentially the same thing).

Here is our explanation of the critical role of interoperability standards in evolving to digital curriculum, specifically with respect to achieving the five potential benefits outlined in part I.

  1. Potentially lower cost. Some people seem to think that all digital learning materials should be free because the distribution costs of an additional copy (once the digital version has already been produced) are essentially zero. A very small zealot group of “free software” advocates have come to the same conclusion regarding software. However, for those of us that live in the real world and want to see higher and higher quality digital products, it is very obvious that digital materials will still have a cost associated with them – and the price will be market-driven – meaning it may be lower, or may even be higher than today’s printed books. Regardless, it is very clear that having to reformat digital learning into a wide array of formats to run a wide variety of devices and software platforms (e.g. Apple, Google, Amazon, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Instructure, Moodle, Pearson, Global Scholar) will add cost to the production equation. Even if the set of options in the education space were limited and static this is a daunting situation. It even becomes a “competitive” situation where content providers try to “be the first to market” on newer and sexier platforms with large market share. While this may all seem “fun” to the end users the reality here is that the dollars spent on essentially reformatting and recoding are dollars NOT spent on creating better learning materials. And, the cost of having to deal with the diverse platforms is shifted to the end-users (teachers and students) and the IT departments who must figure out how to equitably support BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology). Unless innovative digital learning experiences are easy to support in the educational context, well, they just won’t get incorporated. Thus, the critical need for interoperability between content and platforms to help remove the cost associated with platform diversity is very clear. While the worldwide web interoperability standards (such as HTML 5 managed by the W3C) and browsers (as the ‘platforms’) go a long way to providing content interoperability, they are lacking with respect to some key additional constructs used frequently in education, but rarely in the generic worldwide web (such as assessment).
  2. More interactive and engaging. It has been very encouraging and exciting to see exciting new learning innovations each year as finalists in the IMS Learning Impact Awards, such as game-based learning, adaptive tutors, social learning and simulations. Some of the most innovative applications come from small start-ups with very limited resources. Unless innovative digital learning experiences are easy for IT, teachers and students, as well as suppliers, to integrate into the educational context, well, they just won’t get incorporated. The hurdles that get in the way are multiple logins, manual transfer of enrollment information, passing of other parameters that enable students to interact in the right groups and so on. If every application and platform accomplishes these integrations with their own APIs (Application Program Interfaces) – all of which evolve over time – well, its difficult to get any reasonable number of tools integrated in the first place, much less maintained over the years. Most IT departments at even well-funded institutions struggle with care and feeding of 3-5 integrations. Therefore, there is a very obvious and critical need for interoperability standards to make “plug and play” of innovative digital tools and learning experiences easy.
  3. More personalized and accessible.  The popular idea of “learning objects” – meaning chunks of content or learning experiences – that can be delivered at the right place and the right time, is not new. This has been the primary objective that people have been envisioning with the explosion of the Internet/worldwide web, as well as before with CBT (computer based training). In fact there have been many products over the last 20 years that have focused on this approach – with adaptive tutors/homework applications perhaps now becoming the most successful in the education context (while still penetrating only a relatively small percentage of the market). The goal is personalized learning. However, in order for this to work when more than one content/application provider/source is involved requires a lot of interoperability to make finding the right resource at the right time tractable for teachers or students. First of all, for highly relevant objects to be “found” there needs to be some agreement on the metadata used to search for them. This metadata not only describes the content, but also potentially the state/progress of student learning, so that the two can be compared. Now, once the right object is found there are potentially the same integration issues as detailed in (1) and (2) above. The other very important aspect of personalization is accessibility. Not only do students have preferences for how they can best learn digitally (audio vs. visual, font size and type, etc.) but the exploding use of a rapidly evolving array of tablet devices both mean that alternative representations of learning objects that fit the user and usage are required. Without interoperability standards to enable user preferences and platform versatility, the development of content and apps becomes much more expensive than today’s printed books.
  4. Producing usable data. As mentioned in (3), a primary foundation of achieving personalized learning digitally is the need to describe student progress. The concept of progress is often thought of as a learner profile and the potential prescribed paths are often referred to as learning maps. As with (3), if the application is completely self-contained and does not provide data to other applications then interoperability is not required. However, if it is desired to have multiple content/applications/assessments work together to help teachers and students, then interoperability standards for activities, outcomes, learner profiles and learning maps become critical. While one can certainly conceive of a data warehouse with a huge amount of data not complying to any standard, the degree to which aspects of student progress can be agreed upon can potentially be more actionable. Of course, this is the goal for standardized testing and other forms of assessment.
  5. Easier to transport. One laptop or notebook computer certainly weighs less and takes less space than multiple paper textbooks. But, if we put all of the learning materials into an accepted format, such as PDF, this would allow us to eliminate the books without making any progress on potential benefits (2), (3) or (4). Worse yet, it is entirely possible that the teacher, student and IT department could end up having to deal with a myriad of platforms (because not all apps and content run on all platforms) AND textbooks. Yikes! More cost, more weight, more space. Thus, an absence of interoperability standards could  and probably is resulting in the worse possible scenario for students, teachers and institutions.

Now, since relatively little interoperability as required for personalized digital learning per the above exists today in the marketplace, a natural question to ask is “where is the best place to start?” Another way to ask this question is “what needs to come first in order to enable evolution over time to personalized digital learning?”

The method for determining such things in IMS is to start multiple threads of action and see which ones the market adopts first. Absent of third-party incentives (such as grants that favor one priority over another) the education community participants are pretty smart about building their future. It is very difficult to achieve market adoption of a “standard” when there is large diversity and competition among approaches. In such cases it is better to consider early developments as potential input to the standards process – rather than as a standard.

The good news is that the answer is clear based on actual market activity. In recent years, the IMS community has overwhelmingly adopted standards that provide basic plumbing to enable learning platforms, content and applications to “plug and play.” These are the standards in IMS known as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), Common Cartridge and Learning Information Services (LIS). In addition, IMS members are adopting Question & Test Interoperability (QTI) and the Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP) for providing interoperability of assessments (Note: Common Cartridge also includes a version of QTI and APIP is based on the Common Cartridge structure – so we have consistency in standards approach across learning and assessment resources). These standards are the simple “glue” that enable a seamless experience for the users, while dramatically reducing the time and cost of integration and upkeep (by a factor of 10-100x).

“Linked content” is a very popular form of interoperability that applies to hosted content, tools, simulations, adaptive tutors, games

Using this collection of standards – which IMS calls the Digital Learning Services (DLS) Standards – content and apps are plugging into institutional systems like never before. Over 150 certifications for plug and play have been issued to date – all is the last few years – and accelerating today.

For those institutions, states, districts worldwide that wish to take advantage of the progress IMS has achieved in market adoption of these standards, especially those wanting to put in place a strong foundation for digital curriculum and personalized digital learning, IMS has recently released a document that describes how to specify requirements for digital content and applications based on open standards. Please read the press release and the document: Open-Standards Requirements for Digital Content and Application Integration with Enterprise Learning Platforms – and let us know if you have any questions! We are pleased to help all institutions and states evolve to open standards.

Does this mean that IMS is ignoring the other areas such as outcomes data, analytics, profiles or learning maps? Absolutely not. IMS has been active in these areas for years and is in the process of rolling these out at market speed, using the DLS standards as the backbone.  The prioritization comes around supporting key market drivers, such as support for the U.S. Common Core State Standards, the rise of e-textbooks, the need for federated search (as integration of multiple products grows), etc. IMS members that are experts and experienced market participants in each area are driving each area – and these requirements are addressed in incremental/evolved versions of the specifications. Such evolution also allows for region specific variations, as depending on the interoperability area, there can be some significant diversity. This is of course less true in the plumbing layer.

In the next installment, part III, we will address the spectrum of three scenarios for evolving to a digital learning ecosystem. Whereas the discussion above and RFP guidance that IMS has produced will help you regardless of which of the scenarios you chose, there is a clearly preferred approach that makes sense for today and probably the next 5-10 years. Perhaps surprisingly, our view is VERY different than what is being encouraged by huge investment from the Gates Foundation in projects like LRMI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) and SLC (Shared Learning Collaborative) / InBloom.  We will explain in part III.


 

Evolving to digital curriculum based on open interoperability standards, Part I

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Introduction to the spectrum of approaches to evolving to digital curriculum that we are seeing in the marketplace

Many state level education authorities, local education authorities and colleges/universities are looking at accelerating the movement towards digital curriculum materials.  This is because digital materials have many potential advantages. Among these are:

  1. Potentially lower cost than printed textbooks because there are potential savings in the printing and distribution.
  2. More interactive and engaging student experience as digital curriculum can potentially be much more interactive and up-to-date than printed materials.
  3. More personalized and accessible in that digital materials can be chunks of content or applications that go directly at a perceived gap in competency or an alternative learning style or a preferable set of user delivery preferences.
  4. Producing data usable by the teacher and student in that digital materials can assess student progress and identify potential gaps via digital assignments, quizzes, etc.
  5. Easier to transport in that digital materials of almost unlimited volume can be carried on a tablet or laptop or even a mobile phone.

In a separate post we have described this evolution from the printed textbook as needing more of a digital toolkit that is easy for faculty to make use of on a student-by-student basis.

We feel that the digital toolkit metaphor is the right one to latch on to if you want to get this right. In fact, it is critical to actualizing the benefits listed above. This is because we see much misguided effort going into two other alternatives that are on opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of the approach.  The approaches are illustrated in the following diagram.

At the very “basic” level of going digital there is the PDF (non-reflowable digital book) or e-text (such as Kindle or Nook) version of a textbook approach. The advantage of this approach is that it is very consistent with well-understood textbook-based models of instruction. The disadvantage is that it only addresses “lower cost” and “easier to transport.” The other major issue with this approach is that many of the mobile readers each have their own proprietary platform formats.  This includes the proprietary standalone app formats of Apple devices. In other words, support across a range of platforms is a major issue with anything other than static PDF. And static PDF is not usable across all screen sizes – that is, a printed textbook is generally better.

At the very other end of the spectrum is what we affectionately term “learning objects in the sky” approach. This is a very advanced vision of being able to find, mix & match instructional materials from all over the web. This is not a new vision at all. The reason we have affection for this idea is that IMS has been involved in working to enable this vision since 1995.  There has been a lot of well-intentioned investment in this vision – and there is a new wave of such activities today that are attracting quite a bit of buzz. One is the Learning Registry – that has been funded by the U.S. Government and the Gates Foundation. Another is LRMI (Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) funded by the Gates Foundation. And, the Shared Learning Collaborative, now InBloom, again, funded by the Gates Foundation.  While IMS completely agrees with the learning object vision, the fatal flaw has been the ability of these “found materials” to fit together and thus produce a better instructional experience. There are numerous other issues associated with achieving this vision – none of which have been adequately addressed by the new initiatives. We will cover these in more depth in future installments. The bottom line is that whereas this approach has great aspirations to achieve the interactive/engaging, personalized experience and usable data benefits listed above, the current implementations are far from overcoming the large obstacles to getting there.

In the middle is the digital toolkit idea. This is where the productive activity is today. The approach fundamentally is about selecting digital material suppliers (commercial, OER, whatever works) that are carefully selected to be complementary to the instructional approach desired, ability to provide the data desired to students & teachers, and ability to easily work in a coordinated fashion with the other sources selected. Based on our interactions with both buyers and sellers, while there are still many issues that need to be worked out to get to this more modest goal (versus the learning object in the sky), that it is a more pragmatic approach with a higher probability of getting to all five potential benefits above.

In the next two installments we will discuss some specifics regarding the types of content interoperability that must be supported to achieve the five potential benefits of evolving to digital and the perennial issue of metadata (needed to describe and thus search for learning resources). Also, we will review some RFP guidance, policy and analysis papers as they are released in next couple of weeks.

Race to the Top of What?

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Recently IMS published a position paper entitled, “Evolving Personalized Learning: Maximizing K12 Expenditures to Support Instructional Reform”  authored by Don Manderson of Escambia County School District, Florida. Don is a member of the advisory board of the IMS I3LC (Instructional Innovation through Interoperability Leadership Council), which was set up by IMS for school districts and states around the world to collaborate in leading the effective application of technology to K12. Here are the key takeaways from the paper – and below some introduction on how this relates to the global race to the top in education.

As we often discuss in IMS, the U.S. Department of Education initiated “Race to the Top” program has a very relevant name. While those in the U.S. might think of RTTT as a program to incentivize U.S. states to achieve instructional reform, the more significant “race to the top” is in terms of the global economy: the race among nations to compete more effectively and therefore prosper in the knowledge age.

However, at issue is how will reaching the top be measured? Well, certainly fixing the leaks in the pipeline of students who do not graduate at each level is one indicator. Another typical measure is scores on various standardized assessments. Unfortunately for the U.S. test scores and graduation rates relative to other countries have fallen dramatically over the last couple of decades.

The U.S. is investing heavily in the Race to the Top Assessment Program with the hope of achieving more authentic assessment that encourages more effective instruction – with the goal of improving the pipeline and scores – something that the previous U.S. government program “No Child Left Behind” failed at miserably.

However, the U.S. and every other nation need to carefully assess for itself what measures will really define “the top” as it relates to leading in the increasingly global and competitive world economy.  What really matters in terms of global economic success and what does that imply for what a system of education can deliver? Not all educational experts are onboard with the theory that maximizing test scores should be the goal. For example, Yong Zhao, an educational scholar (and keynote speaker/panelist at IMS Learning Impact 2013 in San Diego, May 13-16) has conducted research that leads to the conclusion that it is  other factors that matter more, namely fostering diversity of talents, creativity, entrepreneurship, and passion.

The key point is that the global race to the top is as much about understanding what are the salient attributes of getting to the top as it is anything else. And, from my travels around the world I think it is safe to say that no country has figured this out yet.

One common theme around the world: the need to move to personalized learning – something in IMS we often call closed-loop learning – because personalization requires feedback and adaptation.

Personalized Learning = Closed-Loop Learning

Something the U.S. education system appears to have going for it is the acceptance of a diversity in approaches to “a better education.”  The challenge with diversity is that it does not scale. Many points of light do not necessarily lead to a beacon of change. We see this in spades in education. There is no shortage of examples: really effective innovation here and there. But, if innovation is based on a particular teacher or a particular local approach, does it scale? Does grant funding of individual points of light create innovation that scales? I think history indicates that the answer is no, or at least very slow.

Therein lies the potential brilliance of the U.S. Race to the Top initiatives.  Awards are relatively large sums of money to institute large-scale reforms. Will it work? Too early to tell – the next few years will be very interesting. But I do applaud the realization by the U.S. Department of Education that funding to create and implement scalable reforms is what is needed.

But if you are on the front lines, in a school district, should the race to the top be viewed as a good thing or more of a new burden from the top? After all, top down mandates from No Child Left Behind were a disaster. Will Race to the Top reforms be any different?

In the paper entitled, “Evolving Personalized Learning: Maximizing K12 Expenditures to Support Instructional Reform,” Don Manderson takes the positive side of the argument that in fact there is (perhaps, finally some) alignment occurring with respect to the personalized learning goals of teachers/students/parents and the top-down reforms via race to the top.  The paper presents a holistic view. One in which the new Common Core State Standards provide a basis for enabling project-based learning to be more instructionally sound. At the core of the hypothesis is the need for interoperability – driving down the time and cost of integrating diverse digital resources to be available to teachers and students. An open vendor-neutral platform is the ONLY way this can be achieved in an evolvable, sustainable fashion. As such, an open vendor-neutral standards-based platform becomes a key element of “getting to the top” as districts, institutions and nations strive towards personalized and life-relevant learning that could potentially fix current leaks and create new vistas. In fact, it is difficult to imagine innovation in personalized learning that scales without the open, vendor-neutral, standards-based platform.

Until educational innovation gets ‘easy’ it won’t happen at the scale we need it to happen. Technology in service to education needs to be easy.

The paper presents a compelling vision – and IMS is working closely with a set of leading districts and leading suppliers to put the open foundation in place.  We thank the IMS member organizations for taking the high road of collaboration on the next generation open platform for teaching and learning.

 

 

U.S. Education DataPalooza: What Happened There and How It Relates to IMS Global’s Work?

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Is educational data boring?  You might think so.

But, after attending the White House/U.S. Department of Education DataPalooza event held this week (October 9, 2012) I’ll have to say that I’m a believer in the role data can play in enabling educational innovation. And for governments around the world wanting to encourage positive educational change, you need to consider the important and potentially transformational role data can play.

The event featured a morning of stellar presentations from a mix of government officials (including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and MC’d by U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park), entrepreneurs and well-established education suppliers.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at the Education DataPalooza 10/09/2012

Organizations that presented included Gallup Education, Agilix, EverFi, Georgia Department of Education, eScholar,Personal, Utah Education Network, Pearson, York County Schools Virginia, Alltuition, Rezolve, BecomeAlum, Knewton, U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Education Superhighway, Mozilla Foundation, and The Manufacturing Institute.

Having interacted with the U.S. Department of Education under the Obama administration for several years now, I have to say that I have been impressed with their ability to bring together leaders and encourage change. This was about as good of a ½ day of thought leader presentations – highlighting real emerging practice – as I have attended anywhere at any time. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this initiative represents the future of U.S. education innovation.

I’d like to detail some of what occurred, in terms of content covered and then relate it to our work in the IMS Global Learning Consortium.

The Education Open Data Initiative is similar to U.S. government led initiatives in other segments. The major thrust of these initiatives is that people can make better decisions and be served better if they have ready access to “their data” accumulated over a life time. It’s common sense that a patient can make better decisions and receive better care if their medical history is readily available.  Same with education. Seems like a “no-brainer.”

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (recently returning from a “Back-to-School Bus Tour”)   kicked things off by challenging the audience to leverage data as a potential  “game changer” for U.S. education.  U.S. ED is doing more than just talking about this – they are actively encouraging it with initiatives like the MyData button, which encourages institutions and suppliers to make personal data (regarding educational achievements) available to educational consumers.

Of course, rarely is data by itself that useful.  It’s the information – actionable information – that is derived from the data – that is what tends to be most useful. So, for instance, using the medical analogy, an x-ray or MRI provide good sources of data for some issues – but both need to be interpreted by a specialist to get the most useful information out of them.

As such, many of the presentations featured applications that use the data, as opposed to the data itself. Where can “data” help the educational process and student success? Here were some of the key areas highlighted at the Education DataPalooza:

  1. Better understanding student interests, progress and productivity in K-12 in order to provide them with the right help at the right time, including helping them focus on their strengths
  2. Helping students connect their interests and curriculum to their career interests, even at a relatively young age
  3. Scaling personalized attention to students (data collection, and perhaps analysis, needs to be automated or semi-automated to help teachers help more students) and allowing them to work at their own pace
  4. Helping students make the right choice in selecting a college that fits their interests, background and budget.
  5. Helping reduce the time and effort required to apply for financial aid and college acceptance
  6. Helping with the movement of students within and across states and between colleges
  7. Enabling the finding of appropriate learning resources (using metadata) available throughout the web
  8. Enabling adaptive testing and creation of unique syllabus / learning plan for every student
  9. Understanding school Internet connectivity issues so they can be addressed
  10. Helping students connect their interests and curriculum to their career to job placement
  11. Enabling “badges” or “competency-based” learning credentials to either supplement or replace traditional college credit – especially with respect to skills that help with obtaining employment

Wow! Feeling a bit overwhelmed? Data is nothing less than the future of education. Which is what made this event so powerful and interesting!

Of course, as Karen Cator (Director of the Office of Educational Technology) pointed out, there is no single magic bullet in improving education, whether it be technology, data, or anything else. And, one of the most poignant comments came from Jim Shelton (Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement) who stated that while the event was excellent, that the key element to success will be what happens after the event in terms of industry really working together to create a movement of transformation.

What does all this mean for the work of IMS and technical interoperability standards? Well, at first glance it is a complete no-brainer that many of the data connections required to achieve the above goals will be a lot lower cost and easier to make happen if they are based on standards.

Of course, every supplier has “open APIs” – and sometimes they will even refer to same as “open standards.”

But, the value of a “standard” is that it provides the predominant way to do something – when a standard predominates, it takes cost and complexity out of the market –and those resources can be spent on other things – like innovation. 

So, if there is a single, or a few, dominant platform providers, then, yes, they can claim their approach is a standard. In such cases you see the “platform wars” that we are seeing now with Google, Amazon and Apple. But, if you want many suppliers to be able to participate with low barriers to entry – as is absolutely essential in education – then the only viable route are standards at the core of the industry that are evolved and maintained by industry.

So, when a company – say company xyz – says that anyone can access the data out of their platform based on an open standard – well, that is misleading. If xyz wanted to get their approach accepted as an industry standard they could easily work with standards consortia like IMS to do that – and in so doing would relinquish control to the market.

But, should xyz do that?

This is of course an age old (if the technology industry can be considered “age old”) question that has sprung up many times in the past with programming languages like Java, document formats like PDF, and so forth. When does it make sense for industry to truly cooperate on data exchange?  I’m sure if there was a panel of experts at a conference on this question there would be a very robust debate.  My answer would be pretty straightforward:

When a critical mass of market leaders believe that there is more “opportunity” for them if they cooperate versus if they don’t, then they will cooperate.

I put the word opportunity in quotes because in industries like education opportunity does not simply equal more revenue, but also includes institutions themselves being more responsive to their mission.  Will they cooperate via a standards consortium? Yes if the consortium is responsive to the needs of the market. No if it is not.

One way that a standards consortium can be “responsive” to a market is to be out in front of it. That is, the standards consortium can play a role in enabling the market. I think it’s fair to say that IMS had a reasonably significant role in enabling the market for learning/course management systems in education. I think it’s also fair to say that IMS is playing a significant role in enabling a wide variety of digital content and learning tools/applications to be better utilized in the context of the educational enterprise.

So, rather than focus on the data exchanges, as tempting as that is, IMS is more focused on the opportunities that we are trying to enable.  At our annual Learning Impact Conference and Awards Program we have focused for the last six years on the transformational educational delivery models that are needed and the technology that supports them. Some of the speakers at the Education DataPalooza talked about those breakthrough ideas – like helping students focus on their strengths, learn at their own pace, and get motivated by solving real world problems.

Throwing technology at education will not create educational transformation or the movement that nations around the world are striving for.

The role of the educational institutions and educational leaders is so crucial to the transformation that is needed.  There are going to continue to be hangovers from buying the latest platform championed by a few geeky leaders in the hopes that this will create change. And, in a nutshell, IMS needs to bring together the educational leadership community with suppliers of all shapes and sizes to figure out where the mutual opportunities are and standardize the common ground.

There are many areas that IMS is actively working on that directly relate to the DataPalooza key areas listed above.  I’ll give you my perspective on just a few:

  • Using data/metadata to find content. There have been many admirable efforts over the last 15 years to establish metadata standards and several recent initiatives such as the Gates Foundation funded LRMI and the Learning Registry funded by the U.S.  Government. While admirable, and potentially usable, the models behind these of “learning objects in the sky” does not seem connected to any transformative model of education that has been realized anywhere over the last 15 years. Repositories and such have been noble efforts at sharing – with claims of lots of downloads and page views – that have not created much opportunity yet. In IMS we are focused on enabling ANY application to be the source or destination of a search:  And to make it easy for institutions to configure those sources and destinations.  If you’re thinking “we can create our own app store based on standards” – well, that’s right. Perhaps the most important aspect of this enabling the content providers to understand user information and context – which is critical to allowing them to provide the ultimate value to users.
  • Getting useful and usable information out of digital learning experiences. Analytics is a hot topic in almost every vertical industry right now. There were some pretty dramatic claims made by one of the companies presenting at the Education DataPalooza with respect to how their product could collect information across many students and analyze this information in real-time to provide each student with a unique syllabus each day. At IMS we see two fundamental types of data coming from digital learning experiences. The first is the “usage” information. How much are various digital resources used? This may seem unimportant to some – but, as we move from print to digital this is critical information that institutions and publishers need. The IMS e-textbook task force is focusing on this. The 2nd type of data is performance data – how far has the student progressed in their learning? Of course, this is the realm of assessment. More and better formative assessment, learning dashboards, and the like seem to be critical to helping with engagement.  IMS is very actively engaged in working to understand what data the market is willing to standardize on and what they are not wiling to standardize on. IMS has been covering the rise of adaptive tutors/homework applications – subject-specific software that uses data across many users to tailor learning paths and provide better feedback to students and teachers.  Can industry agree on a way to describe student progress? Will the Common Core State standards enable this in the U.S.? I think it is clear that there must be room to support diversity and innovation with respect to understanding student progress. I think a more likely scenario that will enable market opportunity is the encouragement of competing tools that can rapidly assess and recommend learning plans that are vetted by a teacher. Fundamentally, the acid test is correlating learning activities to “performance” on a variety of summative assessments. We have a long way to go before this can be accomplished, but, if doable, this does enable opportunity for market participants.
  • Education and Career Positioning Systems. Many of the products and concepts discussed at the Education DataPalooza fit into an emerging category of products IMS refers to as Education and Career Positioning Systems (ECPS). The idea is very simple – give students something analogous to a GPS but that helps them understand where they are on their educational and career path. Of course, this is easier said than done. If it were easy, it would have been done already.  IMS is currently working closely with the Lone Star College System in Texas and an advisory board of college leaders to understand what data standards will create opportunity in this exciting new area. See call for participation here.   We think it is critically important to work with colleges to bring the ECPS to fruition to enable student engagement and responsibility, as ultimately colleges must be on board for the educational improvements and innovations to be realized.  Again, innovative educational models is what will enable educational transformation. IMS and Lone Star have assembled a set of innovative suppliers that are willing to work on defining the open data standards required. To be effective, an educational positioning system must bring together data from the right set of “satellites.” And, the project is also leveraging the U.S. Department of Education MyData initiative, which already leverages IMS and other standards.  This will become, we hope, a great example of how open data can enable a new product category. And, we hope the availability of open standards will enable many existing and new suppliers both inside and outside the educational enterprise to partake.

In summary, as I have written in other posts, the education industry is one that is still trying to figure out how to best leverage technology.  We are at an infantile stage, both in terms of the technology and technical interoperability standards in this segment.

It is only through leadership of individuals and organizations – cooperative leadership – that we can realize transformation to an industry that knows how to leverage technology for better results. I’d like to thank the White House and U.S. Department of Education and the IMS Member organizations for your leadership on this journey. 

IMS is very good at fostering collaboration, even among competitors, and we have a crucial role to play.

 

U.S. K-12: Wake Up and Smell the Roses – Going Digital Is Looking A Lot More Tractable – And Your District – Regardless of Size – Can Play a Leadership Role

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Personalized learning, closed loop learning, instructional improvement – it goes by many names but the core goal is the same – match educational resources and experiences to better fit the needs of students and teachers working with those students.

IMS has been working with a leading set of U.S. school districts and suppliers to put in place interoperability of digital content and apps in educational settings that can reduce the friction of making closed loop learning a reality.

There has been a couple recent announcements from large suppliers to the U.S. K-12 market that are notable because this means that the IMS standards will soon be in a majority of districts. See SAFARI Montage announcement and Compass Learning announcement

Leading suppliers, while realizing that they are cutting into a source of revenues for custom integrations, are also realizing that the wasted effort on such integrations is literally holding the industry back.  If every automobile had custom tires and custom mounts for tires it would really slow down the adoption of automobiles. That is what is happening in education today. Luckily, leading suppliers are getting this and voluntarily moving to IMS.

But, there is also great benefit to the school districts and higher education institutions.

In fact at a recent IMS meeting – August 2012 – New York City Department of Education – largest school district in the U.S. serving over 1 million students – said that they had calculated a savings of 8-10x per integration by using the IMS standards in iLearnNYC. But, this is not just for large districts. In fact, the greatest potential is in smaller districts who can not afford the IT expense associated with product integration and maintenance.

So, at one level this is simply about removing cost – both in terms of dollars for custom integrations and the unnecessary “clunkiness” of having myriad products and platforms that are all standalone. If we want digital education to be “better” than paper education, well, both of those barriers need to be removed.  At this level the IMS standards are all about enabling a digital education revolution (or evolution if that is how you would like to characterize it).  Basically you “Don’t  want to go digital without leveraging the work of IMS.” It will be too costly, not user friendly and ultimately be perceived as more difficult than what you had prior with little or no gain in results.

Getting standards in place as the foundation of a market (as opposed to just one alternative) requires leadership. Folks like to point to the Web and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example of where standards are at the foundation of a market. It would be difficult to imagine “web bowsers” and “web servers” as possible without the W3C standards. It took some strong leadership to make the web happen. Well, the challenge for the education segment in terms of leadership are even greater in that the web was a new market opportunity from scratch. Education is an existing market that is used to operating without standards. To change a market to being based on standards is a tall order!

Examples of how two K-12 districts in the U.S. are leading is documented nicely in this Tech & Learning blog interview with Keller Independent School District and Forsyth County Schools – see A New Acronym in Education: LTI, Part 2.

But, sometimes standardizing on ball bearings not just takes cost out of the equation but also enables a focus on more innovative things. There is that little thing that all nations around the world are focused on: Getting better educational results.

The clear trend is toward instructional improvement, personalized learning, closed loop learning, analytics, big data, open data, open content, open source, etc. etc. etc.

How is this all going to happen without standards?

For one thing, districts are going to need to leverage content across many forms of  systems: e-Learning platforms, collaboration software, classroom video platforms, interactive whiteboards, instructional management systems, professional development systems, assessment systems, e-books, e-Portfolios and a wide variety of learning tools on a wide variety of computing devices.

For another thing, ditto with respect to getting data out of all these applications and to a place where it can be synthesized rapidly for the benefit of the student.

Well, if you look at the suppliers who are getting IMS certified,  including the latest set if LTI tools and platforms, you will see – for the first time anywhere – the type of mixture of products that need to work together to enable the closed loop learning scenario of the future.

Is this a breakthrough? Absolutely!

This is a historic collaboration across suppliers in the education marketplace that has been enabled by great leadership from the 75 institutions, districts, states and government organizations among the IMS membership.

Where does it go from here?  See a recent interview with Tech & Learning to read more.

The nicest thing about this collaboration is that so many districts can literally just “wake up and smell the roses” and benefit from all the great work of the IMS members.

Districts can also join in explicitly via our Instructional innovation through Interoperability Leadership Committee (I3LC).  This is the community of like-minded district leaders collaborating on how to lead the revolution while receiving help from IMS (the first step is understanding how to best gradually evolve to standards to fit your situation and learning how to ask for the standards in a way that guarantees the results you are looking for).

IMS standards: Steroids that are reshaping the digital education market

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For being dead (by some opinions) LMS’s are looking very alive after BbW12 ;-)

This week Blackboard had a record attendance of 3500 at Blackboard World in New Orleans. I think we can infer that the LMS is not yet dead!

At times it seems that the learning technology industry – especially higher ed – is loaded with pundits who have been saying for at least the last 5 years that the LMS is dead or dying and that Blackboard is about to go out of business. At IMS we work with over 100 suppliers and perhaps 10 or less are suppliers of LMSs.  I have explained elsewhere that the LMS is not dying – this market shows more signs of just beginning to take off rather than dying. But, there is a much bigger fish to fry.  It’s the $25 billion U.S. dollars a year spent on paper learning materials.

Michael Chasen also announced at the conference xpLor – a content and application repository that enables sharing of same across multiple platforms – Moodle, ANGEL, Sakai, Blackboard to start.

The growth of the “LMS” (which elsewhere I have commented is a very bad name for the segment) and learning technology segment in general has been epitomized by Blackboard – growing into arguably the most successful education technology company on record to date.  But, the other leading suppliers in the education space are growing as well.

In this post, I’ll explain my thoughts here about how xpLor, Blackboard’s leadership in standards and the coming revolutionizing of the learning technology market are all intertwined through the oft assumed to be “somebody else’s thing to worry about” interoperability standard(s).

Much, if not all of the expenditure on paper books and such is going to convert to digital. Now, if you think that is going to happen without widespread adoption of interoperability standards – you’re not thinking straight.  What’s more, there are a myriad of new online tools being developed to support learning – you can see some of them here in the new IMS LTI developers catalog page. This is an emerging market that has lots of growth potential. The story of “going digital” in education will be the story of standards adoption.

As I have commented elsewhere, the education/learning segment is at the very beginning of figuring interoperability out. But, we are making outstanding progress.

I work with suppliers of all sizes everyday trying to get them to understand standards and suggest to them strategies for interacting with standards organizations. This requires a lot of work because many people and suppliers in this education/learning space simply “don’t get” the concept standards. That is because, in my opinion, we have an existing marketplace with existing practices that simply have not been able to realize high value from standards. We also have the typical “protectionism” of executives who are worried about not being able to lock in their customers. Hopefully we are beginning to get past this phase. The facts are that standards lift up the entire industry – they help “you” – the individual supplier – by helping “you” – the entire industry.

Widespread implementation of standards at the core of an industry eliminates huge cost that is wasted on reinventing the wheel from the supplier side of things – not to mention the wasted custom integration and transition costs from the institutional implementation side. Imagine what the world would be like if everyone made custom ball bearings in every mechanical product?  How far would we have come? Imagine the world without the Internet and without the World Wide Web – because that is what we would have without standards and the standards organizations that are a mechanism for industries to pool resources to put in place the standards that everyone can build upon. If you have great products you benefit when the whole industry is lifted up. I have pointed out elsewhere that the educational technology segment definitely needs such a lift – the segment invests about half the amount in technology as other critical industries.

Standards that change industries do not occur without leadership – especially when we are trying to break and remold an industry culture and vested interests.  Ray Henderson, who came to Blackboard from ANGEL and to ANGEL from Pearson is one of those leaders who completely gets it. He gets that without standards a new market, such as technology to support digital education, is generating “a lot more heat than light” (that is actually a quote from Ray to me from many years back). Ray has been a strong advocate for IMS standards all along the way. But, let’s be clear, Ray has leveraged standards as an effective business strategy, too. Both ANGEL and now Blackboard have gained customer support through leadership in standards – being first to market, being most aggressive in obtaining conformance certification and being aggressive in terms of making technical contributions.

Customers like open standards – and they will reward suppliers for putting them in place. So, I say to the many large and small suppliers out there that have not yet figured out how to leverage standards in this marketplace – you need look no further than the record 3500 attendees at Blackboard World this last week. If you are a leader of a learning technology company and perhaps still don’t get this – let me illustrate further.

By most accounts from the conference, xpLor is a breakthrough product.  If you’re thinking “app store for education” – well I guess that is one way to think about it. Another way to think about it is as a cross-platform learning object repository. Such learning object repositories that really deliver have been elusive – despite lots of investments by states, school districts, universities, university systems over the years. One of the reasons that xpLor is a breakthrough is that it supports the new world of educational content – which are not just downloadable coursepaks or learning objects – but rather web-based applications and tools of a wide variety to be “plugged into” the core platform (LMS, portal, etc.).

Now, Blackboard just announced the acquisitions of Moodle service providers Moodlerooms and NetSpot and bringing onboard Chuck Severance (closely tied to the Sakai community) in March.

So, how did this new capability get in place so fast in Blackboard?

If you are an industry watcher and you are not asking that question – well, you are not watching closely enough!

Well, for one thing, this product was under development by MoodleRooms prior to the acquisition, led by Dave Mills. MoodleRooms also had a team of folks formerly with ANGEL, including Kellan Wampler and Phill Miller, who were instrumental in the leadership of the ANGEL product, and are now at Blackboard via the acquisition.

But there are also the IMS standards themselves that made this possible, namely the Common Cartridge and Learning Tools Interoperability standards upon which xpLor is based. Dave, Kellan and Phill were all deeply involved in both these standards throughout the years.  According to LTI evangelist and guru Chuck Severance – who himself has had a major role:

“@LearningImpact Yes – Dave Mills *is* a genius. xpLor is the first learning platform to use CC and LTI as the core unifying idea.” ‏@drchuck

 

It was these standards that made this cross-platform interoperability possible, not to mention the rapid integration with Blackboard. And, if you’re thinking this is some sort of diabolical plot by Blackboard, think again: Instructure, Desire2Learn and a wide variety of other leading open source and proprietary platforms worldwide, from giant publishers to one person developers, are implementing these standards.

Now, all of this definitely bodes for a different future for the “LMS” platforms indeed – one that is more about providing a framework in which diverse sources of digital content and products can come together. However, I’ve been pretty surprised that many who seem to get that this also seem to think that this is going to somehow unseat the LMS providers. Au contraire! Why?  Because of the IMS standards – and the aggressive adoption by the leading providers of those standards.  It is the IMS interoperability standards that are making the future of the open distributed learning platform possible – and, yes, it is happening.

The announcement of xpLor is one more data point/reality check. And, news alert, there are other suppliers, like SAFARI Montage and Desire2Learn, who are using the same IMS standards to do similar things – but with an underlying basis – standards – that will serve to lift up the market and make this sort of “app store / LOR” pretty common place in the next five years.  In fact, there was just an announcement from New Mexico State University about a new thing called the SoftChalk Cloud, somewhat of a similar concept to xpLor – which integrates with Instructure how?  Via the same IMS standards!

Since the market has been trying to establish capabilities over and over again through various investments, repository products and standards for more than 15 years now without success – well, then IMHO we are indeed at a notable watershed moment.

My thanks to the many IMS faithful around the world over the years who have made the current events and future possible! There are literally 100’s of people and organizations that have been involved in CC/LTI. We are now up to over 110 conformance certification issued for these to specifications – and really we are in many ways just beginning.

It is your leadership that got us here.  You know who you are.

And I’m always looking for more people and organizations who want to help lead this quite revolution – if interested please contact me.