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1EdTech: from 10-100x Revolution to Connected Learning Innovation Challenge!

Today, in preparation for EDUCAUSE 2013 in Anaheim next week 1EdTech has announced the Connected Learning Innovation Challenge!

The Connected Learning Innovation Challenge will feature 1EdTech’s first ever “app challenge” and the establishment of a community of institutional and industry leaders that want to be at the forefront of encouraging a much more diverse and innovative future for educational technology – in real practice at real institutions – not as hype, but as tools that support what teachers and students want to do within the academic enterprise. Note: Kudos and salutations to Instructure Canvas to organizing the first ever LTI app challenge last May-June!

The motivation for the Connected Learning Innovation Challenge is described in a just released EDUCAUSE Review article, A New Architecture for Learning,  that I was fortunate enough to be able to collaborate on with Malcolm Brown, head of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and Jack Suess, VP of IT and CIO at University of Maryland Baltimore County. The article talks about what we as an educational community need to do to enable greater innovation in the connected age and introduces an unprecedented commitment of cooperation among some of education’s leading associations to help make it happen.

1 of 3 1EdTech Revolution Banners at EDUCAUSE 12

1EdTech Revolution Banner at EDUCAUSE 12

Last year at EDUCAUSE 2012 we introduced the 1EdTech 10-100x Open Digital Innovation Revolution.  Is the revolution over? Just the opposite my friends – the revolution is burning like wildfire across K-20 education.  As of EDUCAUSE 2012 there were a cumulative 126 1EdTech conformance certifications. Going into EDUCAUSE 2013 that number is 210! Holy Toledo!  All conformance certifications are listed on IMSCERT.org.  It took roughly 3 years to achieve 126, but in the last year 84 new conformance certifications were achieved! And, the LTI catalog keeps growing - there are about 20 certified platforms now and a myriad of tools/apps.

So, how does the Connected Learning Innovation Challenge relate to the 1EdTech Revolution? The “revolution” is like the paving of the road. As more platforms and applications are based on open standards and can work together with 10-100x less integration cost and time than before, well, then a lot more attention can be put into innovative vehicles to use the roads!  So, the Connected Learning Innovation Challenge – CLIC - is the logical evolution of the revolution –  focusing on what most people care about: great technology that can support or enhance teaching and learning.

To help understand CLIC, or to explain it to your colleagues, I’d like to provide the following talking points from my perspective (you can also visit the CLIC web pages here):

1. CLIC is about institutions working together to figure out how to enable and sustain support for a diverse set of teaching and learning applications (or non-educational apps favored by faculty and students) that can no longer take 6 months to happen. Thus, CLIC is a collaboration to make something happen that many are institutions currently trying to do on their own – but makes more sense to work on collectively.

2. CLIC will accomplish #1 through a few very targeted outputs/activities:

  • Competitions to identify and financially reward innovative apps and platforms supporting connected learning
  • Open source sharing community for sharing things that submitters and/or institutions wish to share, such as tools, frameworks, apps, app gateways, etc. Open source “things” built on standards can be utilized cross platform – so, this is the first ever cross-platform open source initiative anywhere!
  • A facilitated leadership community via listservs and newsletters to keep all interested parties abreast of the happenings, organize the core advocacy/leadership and enable organic growth. There will be app evaluation activities and other community milestones. As an example of organic growth, whereas 1EdTech will be conducting large-scale challenges we will encourage regional/institutional level challenges in conjunction with tech fairs institutions or others may already be conducting.

3. CLIC is NOT an 1EdTech membership program. To lead, support or follow CLIC your organization does not need to be an 1EdTech member. I’m sure lots of 1EdTech member organizations will be supporting CLIC, and, of course the 1EdTech members made all this possible. But, think of CLIC more like the original 1EdTech initiative organized by EDUCAUSE back in the mid-1990’s. CLIC is a collaboration to make something happen without having a whole lot of formality behind it at the start other than the activities themselves. 1EdTech has the chops to facilitate this, but we want it to go in the direction that the institutional leaders who get involved want to take it in terms of something more formal (or not).

Now, I’m going to say right now, from day one, that getting the most out of CLIC for the educational community will take leadership from institutions. Educators and their institutions are going to transform education with innovative technologies – and the CLIC community should be very productive for those wanting to help lead that charge. 1EdTech can facilitate CLIC and put some legs underneath it – but we need institutional leadership, guidance, ideas and resources in terms of time and even financial contributions for those institutions that can. The other nice thing that 1EdTech can bring is a way to sustain and continue the progress that CLIC makes.  1EdTech is a solid organization that has a track record of sustaining and evolving innovative technical work even as leadership is handed off and evolved among institutions and suppliers. If you represent an institutional interest in CLIC, I hope you will consider becoming an institutional advocate as some of your peers are - and we are very thankful indeed - we should really be able to get 100 institutional advocates for CLIC!

Finally, if you have not had a chance yet to view the short 3-minute video compilation of comments from Dr. Charles Severance of University of Michigan describing some of the motivations behind CLIC I highly encourage you to go to the CLIC landing page and view the video in the top left corner!