Sharebar?

1EdTech Standards Provide a Foundation for Integration Between McGraw-Hill Content and Most Course Management System Providers

 

1EdTech Standards Provide a Foundation for Integration Between McGraw-Hill Content and Most Course Management System Providers


published 18 August 2011

In July 2011, McGraw-Hill Education made another significant contribution to our global seamless society by introducing its new service, McGraw-Hill Campus, which enables faculty and administrators the ability to view digital content regardless of whatever course management system (CMS) they use. The easy integration is due, in part, to technological and learning standards established by 1EdTech Consortium.

“We are increasingly becoming a seamless society,” said Isaac Segal, president of M-H Campus & Tegrity, a lecture capture system provider owned by McGraw-Hill. “We push buttons and we expect things to automatically integrate and engage. What we are doing through services like M-H Campus, is making educational resources more accessible. The idea behind it is: if we make our content more acceptable to instructors, they will appreciate the quality of the material and may decide, as a result, to adapt that material for use in their courses.”

Segal said that a year ago, McGraw-Hill partnered with Blackboard to offer their content through the CMS provider’s platform. That pioneering relationship led to deeper integration with other CMS providers, such as Desire2Learn, Sakai, Moodle, and eCollege. Both Blackboard and McGraw-Hill, as well as most of the other CMS providers, are active members of 1EdTech GLC and have contributed to establishing standards for integration between digital educational content and learning management systems.

Company officials say that M-H Campus has received wide acceptance among colleges and universities. Mike Junior, McGraw-Hill’s vice president of new customer and business development, said that even before the offering was officially made public, more than 85 institutions had signed up to use the platform on more than a hundred campuses. Segal said he expects the number of users to be in the high hundreds, if not thousands, a year from now.

1EdTech’s Learning Tools Interoperability™ (LTI) provides the baseline standards that support interaction between learning systems, Segal said. “The 1EdTech standards LTI, LIS (Learning Information Services), and Common Cartridge are evolving nicely to handle a majority of the core interactions among digital content, CMS, and the academic enterprise.” LIS standards support interactions between learning systems and administrative, student, and human resource systems. Common Cartridge supports installation of content, assessment, and web applications into the CMS.

This is a profound opportunity because most students sign into their CMS platform in order to do their homework,” said Junior. M-H Campus also integrates with mobile devices and we provide schools a widget if they want to integrate it with their library system.”

Textbook publishers traditionally have provided their material free to instructors in order to demonstrate the quality of their work. “M-H Campus facilitates access and review through the Internet,” added Segal. “It’s not like a new invention as much as taking it to the next step.” Segal said one of the things institutions and their instructors find particularly exciting about this new delivery system is that they can take a half dozen books, pull a chapter from each, and create their own version.

Interoperability standards can play a major role in helping teachers and institutions,” said Segal. “There is tremendous pressure to innovate without raising costs. As a result, institutions are open to more efficient teaching models, including the use of computers. I see institutions increasingly partnering with vendors on the delivery of content itself.”

Junior said that by bringing together vendors, institutions, and organizations to collaborate on establishing basic integration standards in teaching and learning, 1EdTech has helped reduce R&D costs and enabled providers like McGraw-Hill to deliver content and services to market much faster.

“I’m a huge fan of what 1EdTech is doing,” added Segal. “It has evolved from being a pure standards body into a place where all the organizations are working together and collaborating on standards they can adopt. I think it’s brought real value to the higher education space, and I expect we will become even more involved with 1EdTech going forward.”




About 1EdTech GLC

From Innovation to Impact
1EdTech Learning is a nonprofit member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in higher education, K-12, and corporate education worldwide. 1EdTech GLC members are leading corporations, higher education institutions, school districts and government organizations worldwide that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability standards and major adoption projects for the digital support of education and learning. 1EdTech GLC also sponsors Learning Impact: a global awards program and conference that recognizes the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality. For more information visit www.imsglobal.org or contact info@imsglobal.org .

Citation
To reference this article please cite:
Humes, L. R. (2011). 1EdTech Standards Provide a Foundation for Integration Between McGraw-Hill Content and Most Course Management System Providers. 1EdTech Consortium Series on Learning Impact. August 2011 from http://www.imsglobal.org/articles/aug2011mh.cfm

Copyright © 2011 by 1EdTech Consortium, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
The 1EdTech Logo is a registered trademark of 1EdTech GLC.

tel: +1 407.362.7783
fax: +1 407.333.1365
http://www.imsglobal.org/articles/

More Information