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Learning Impact Blog

Not more than a couple of weeks after my blog post on Gates’ Foundation LRMI and its motivating program InBloom it was announced that InBloom will be “winding down.”

InBloom strictly speaking is a non-profit corporation set up by the Gates Foundation  to provide open source software to implement a data collection system at the state level capable of collecting and analyzing data from (what was hoped to be) numerous educational applications at the district level providing information on student progress. Before the InBloom non-profit was “spun out” the work was incubated under the auspices of the Gates Foundation via a project called first the Shared Learning Initiative (SLI) and later the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC).

We use the term “InBloom” here to represent the entire sequence of work from inception that led to InBloom inclusive, not just the non-profit corporation work.

The stated reason for the wind down of InBloom has focused on one potential adopter – the state of New York – where InBloom has been highly criticized because of potential data privacy issues.

However, I think we need to remember that InBloom was highly touted by the venerable CCSSO (Chief Council of State School Officers) – representing virtually all the U.S. states, funded by the Gates Foundation to the tune of $100-200 million (starting from the initial Shared Learning Infrastructure / Collaborative) and endorsed by at least a half dozen states at the formation of InBloom (with the hope that many, many states would adopt), not to mention support from major industry consortia like SIIA.

The reality is that the SLI/SLC/InBloom ended up being rejected by a much larger body of potential participants than the state of New York. Therefore, focusing on New York alone and the single issue of data privacy doesn’t fully capture the key lessons that many of us already knew and must now solidify based on the InBloom experience.  After all, education is about learning and if we can’t learn from our experiences then it speaks volumes about our education. From the perspective of 1EdTech there were numerous fundamental mistakes made in the planning and execution of InBloom.  Here are some of the key ones:

  1. Spending a lot of money to reinvent the wheel usually doesn’t make much sense. While better use of data in education is a good thing there was not anything that was a breakthrough technically speaking from InBloom. Many, many suppliers could have provided the InBloom capability  (which was basically a data warehouse).   It appears that Gates decided to pick one favored contractor because they were impatient and/or not wanting to work with existing industry providers.  In addition, pretty much every aspect of InBloom was already covered in existing education sector interoperability standards – and this was completely ignored.
  2. You can have a lot of people around the table, but if they aren’t the right people the net result will probably be wrong.  It certainly seems like Gates decided to focus on the states/CCSSO because of the power position they had in terms of adopting the Common Core standards. The problem is that state government is generally not where the “rubber hits the road” in terms of student learning. Yes, there are many caring administrators at the state level who want to do the right thing, but it’s in the schools and the school districts where better learning and teaching needs to occur. It doesn’t take much experience engaging with the K-12 sector to understand that there is a huge divide in most states between the states and the districts. To the districts the idea of sending data to the state and expecting something good to happen is a very big stretch of the imagination. The people that are the good teachers are too busy helping students learn to get involved in pie in the sky projects.
  3. "Small" (read:) actionable data is much more important than big data in education. Readers of this blog have already read what 1EdTech has learned from engaging with the education sector today and a general understanding of where we are in the evolution of education systems historically speaking.  The future of education is not about big or massive. The future of education is about diversity and distinctiveness. The future is about using data to help individual students by putting it in the hands of someone that cares (the student, the parent, the mentor, the teacher).
  4. Working with the education sector is likely to produce a better result than trying to end-run it.  InBloom was an attempt to end-run districts, existing suppliers, and, yes, existing standards organizations like 1EdTech. To be honest, most we have talked to perceive InBloom as a Microsoft style (or any dominant vendor) platform play (no offense meant here to Mr. Gates as we would doubt he had anything to do with the strategy). It goes like this: We will give you the platform and then dominate the market. The problem with going it alone is that existing collaborations in the education sector that are worth their salt (we like to think that 1EdTech is one of them) provide a huge base of historical knowledge as well as existing base of collaboration that helps guide things in the right direction while actually getting there faster and cheaper.
  5. Open source is not open standards – and to build collaboration it is open standards that work best.  Lot’s of folks have been reiterating this for a long time now. It’s so very simple really. With open source you have code that includes things like APIs. But those APIs are evolved by a single controlling entity and not governed by a community. Thus, the controlling entity drives it. This is why the world has numerous standards organizations of all shapes and sizes. Open standards define standards that any party can use, can be implemented in a variety of APIs/programming languages and that are evolved and governed by a defined and legally bound community process.

We hate to see good money wasted in 1EdTech – as we work very hard for the membership dues we collect. Wasting of $100-200 million is pretty inexcusable in our world. In fact, it’s very sad to think what good that money could have achieved.

Our sincere hope is that leaders in this sector – including those that had a hand in InBloom– do not hide behind red herrings like privacy issues in one state. Leaders in education need to learn from their mistakes and course correct. The InBloom mistakes were numerous and fundamental – and pretty visible right from the start. What about data privacy, wasn’t that a core issue? We don’t see it that way. The data privacy concern was just a symptom – not the root cause.

While 1EdTech never saw InBloom as a direct competitor, the reality is that in the time it took to spend that $100-200 million on InBloom – 1EdTech continues to grow organically and has issued over 280 conformance certifications for interoperable learning platforms, tools, applications and resources – and is now building data collection capability via open standards (Caliper) into all of these.  Hmmm . . . kind of sounds like a shared learning collaborative of some kind since there are over 240 collaborating organizations in 1EdTech. Investment required to get here: Less than $10 million spread among 240 members.

Interesting contrast in approaches and results.  

Today’s 1EdTech announcement of the first group of winning products and organizations to undergo conformance certifications for QTI and APIP is a very, very big step for e-assessment interoperability worldwide. 

1EdTech certification seal

For years, no decades, the majority of e-assessment suppliers worldwide have been riding for free on the back of the 1EdTech Question & Test Interoperability TM (QTI TM) specification. QTI has been a labor of love and importance within 1EdTech and led by organizations such as SURF, JISC, University of Cambridge, ETS, BPS Bildungsportal Sachsen (BPS) and University of Pierre & Marie Curie.

These organizations, other than ETS, are not household names in most of U.S. education sector. But they tirelessly carried the load of developing really the world’s only viable interoperability standard for digital interoperability of tests, test items and associated results.

About two years ago the U.S. decided to invest in the Common Core learning standards for K-12 and also launched the Race-to-the-Top Assessment program to encourage states to cooperate on designing and delivering new electronic assessments in conjunction with the Common Core. Shortly ahead of that 1EdTech collaborated with a group of U.S. states to define an evolution of QTI called APIP TM (Accessible Portable Item Protocol TM)which consists of QTI plus some new features to address requirements for special needs students. And, the Netherlands also began partnering with 1EdTech to develop a countrywide initiative to evolve to e-assessment starting with one particular test (similar to the U.S. SAT or college entrance).

These investments in e-assessment have led to a dramatic rise in participation in QTI and APIP in 1EdTech. If you look at the 1EdTech membership list today it is arguably the who’s who of leading assessment organizations, certainly in the U.S. but also perhaps worldwide. The 1EdTech APIP/QTI work over the last 2 years has been co-chaired by Measured Progress, ETS and Pearson with heavy involvement from McGraw-Hill CTB, ACT, Pacific Metrics, NWEA, Data Recognition Corporation and a variety of other assessment industry heavy weights. And in the Netherlands CITO has been leading the charge.

Life has been good. But market development and adoption of standards is always a kind of “chicken and egg” sort of thing.  As mentioned at the very beginning of this post worldwide assessment suppliers of many stripes had been talking up QTI for a very long time. Problem was that every supplier had their own version of QTI and therefore very little interoperability ensued. As we have discussed in other posts, this type of standardization does not deliver on the actual cost and time reduction that standards need to deliver on in the digital world. If conformance to a standard still requires lots of custom programming to get interoperability, well, then it isn’t a very good standard.

Thus, realizing this issues of “loose standards” running rampant in the ed tech sector the 1EdTech members decided to get serious – and also save themselves lots of time and money in redoing integrations – by implementing 1EdTech conformance certification. As we have discussed elsewhere, 1EdTech conformance certification is not a marketing program (although those that go through it obviously do have the right to market that fact) but more of a “UL certified” designation of getting through a testing program. The conformance certification is much more than a “final test to the specification.” The conformance certification program is actually critical to evolving to the best possible specification for the needs of the marketplace. Typically only by going through the testing can the specification be refined and improved.  1EdTech has seen this process work over and over again with all our specifications the last several years.

The problem is that many vendors often kind of “hope for a miracle” many times with specifications. They hope that even without going through implementation and testing that magically a specification will work.  I think anyone that has ever developed software and does a little projecting of that experience on to a specification – that essentially must bring together the development process/experience of numerous software products – will realize that a good specification requires development participation and feedback from multiple vendors. The 1EdTech conformance certification process – and ongoing developer community and related specification evolution (we call it an APMG: Accredited Profile Management Group) – is that “hub” where the development experience of the multiple suppliers comes together into a great specification.

It’s really a very simple concept but it is greatly complicated by the realities of new markets and new product development where suppliers are challenged to respond to the needs of their project deliverables and the needs to cooperate on the standards testing and evolution.

All that background so that you know that what 1EdTech announced today, that five leading organizations have now completed conformance certification for APIP/QTI across a range of product types, is a huge step forward for the e-assessment community. By “community” we mean the suppliers and the states and end-users of e-assessments.  In addition to the leadership shown by the suppliers listed in this post, this milestone has required exemplary leadership from the end-user organizations that have been key partners in this, namely Maryland, Minnesota, WIDA, Smarter Balanced and the College Voor Examens Netherlands.

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We are still relatively early in the adoption of high quality e-assessment worldwide. But what today’s announcement proves is that leading supplier and end-user organizations can come together to enable all the many benefits of interoperable assessments (for a more detailed discussion of these benefits see What You Need to Know About e-Assessment).

It is now time for those organizations that have either gathered around the 1EdTech QTI/APIP table or been long claiming that they are “conforming” to these standards, to contribute to the community by participating in the conformance certification process.

Today’s announced winners were:

APIP:

Platinum:Educational Testing Service/Computerized Assessments and Learning TOMS v3.0.0.0 PNP system (APIP v1.0 PNP Core Compliant) and Sample Students’ Instances v1.0 (APIP v1.0 PNP Content Core Compliant)

Gold:Pacific Metrics Unity v1.9 (APIP v1.0 PNP Core Compliant, APIP v1.0 Item Test Bank Import Compliant)

Silver:Computerized Assessments and Learning Test Delivery system v2.3 (APIP v1.0 Delivery Entry Compliant)

QTI:

Platinum:BPS Bildungsportal Sachsen GmbH ONYX Testsuite v5.3.1 (QTIv2.1 Authoring Compliant, QTIv2.1 Delivery Compliant, QTIv2.1 Item Test Bank Compliant)

Gold:Northwest Evaluation Association Formative Assessment Item Bank v14.1 (QTI v2.1 Item Test Bank Compliant) and NWEA SCIP v14.1 (QTI v2.1 Content Compliant)

The winners will be honored and presented with their awards during the Learning Impact Awards ceremony at the 2014 Learning Impact Leadership Institute 5-8 May 2014 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact2014/.

Here are some links to addition press releases regarding this important milestone:

ETS Assessment Management System Provides Standardized Platform to Manage Statewide Assessments

Pacific Metrics’ Unity Platform Earns 1EdTech Consortium Assessment Conformance Certification

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1EdTech announced today the winners of our first (of what we expect to be many) annual connected learning innovation challenge (aka app challenge – but this is a bit of a misnomer because the challenge is as much about platforms and tools as apps). And, our eternal hats off to Instructure Canvas for creating the idea for an App Challenge and conducting the first ever last year in conjunction with their annual conference.

We say “Hap’s got apps” because Hap Aziz is the 1EdTech wrangler for this emerging education and learning app community.

Here’s an FAQ about the challenge, including plans going forward.

Q: How many entries and how many winners were there?

A: There were 22 entries and 5 top apps were selected as the winners.

Q: Where can I see the entries and the winners?

A: The winners are summarized in the press release and on the App Challenge Winner web page.  The winners and the other entries are also listed toward the bottom of the LTI certified product web page. You can also sign-up to get the (roughly) monthly CLIC (Connected Learning Innovation Community) newsletter here – which will have features on the winning and other notable apps as well as community news.

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Q: Who chose the winners and how were they chosen?

A: Many thanks to a panel of expert evaluators , primarily institutional leaders, but a few suppliers, who developed a rubric for the evaluation. My understanding is that there was excellent convergence on the winners.

Q: Are these “apps” like the kind of apps available on Google Play or iTunes?

A: No – these 1EdTech app challenge apps are generally a lot better because they are powered with LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability). That’s because these are apps that can connect into over 25 different learning environments/platforms including all of the major learning management systems. Thus, these are “cross-platform” apps, unlike Apple or Google apps which generally only work on Apple. Or Google. In addition the 1EdTech app challenge apps exchange highly useful information with the over 25 learning environments/platforms, such as user information, rosters, progress data, etc. So, the 1EdTech app challenge apps are real enterprise learning apps and not the sort of limited individual user apps  people download to their mobile device from PlayStore or iTunes.

Q: “Could” mobile apps such as those downloaded from Google Play or iTunes become 1EdTech LTI Apps?

A: That’s a bit of a complicated question because it involves software architecture and software architecture limitations of the operating systems involved, but the general answer is ‘yes’. The web-hosted “back-end” of mobile apps as well as the apps themselves could potentially leverage LTI (and/or other 1EdTech standards) to connect to learning environments/platforms. To date we have not had any great examples of this but it is only a matter of time before it will happen.

Q: Was there money or other recognition involved in the Challenge?

A: Yes, each of the top five will receive a $1000 prize and also will be recognized at the 1EdTech Learning Impact Leadership Institute May 5-8, 2014 in New Orleans.  There will also be a plenary panel and entire track on connected learning at the event, facilitated by Hap Aziz, with many of the entrants and evaluators as participants.

Q: Where did the money come from?

A:  A huge debt of gratitude is owed to the organizations that were financial supporters of the challenge and community. They made it possible.  Cengage Learning, Ellucian, Follett, Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne, Instructure Canvas, McGraw-Hill Education, Oracle, Pearson, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Vital Source.  The initiative requires ongoing support and if your organization would like to sponsor in the future, please contact us at leadingchange@imsglobal.org.

Q: Were you pleased with the quality of the entrants and winners?

A: Very much so. The winners were a mix of small (including tiny) and larger organizations. The top vote getter, Hoot.me, was an extremely innovative combination of the educational enterprise with Facebook. This reflects a trend in which innovative faculty want to take advantage of existing non-educational applications, but couple them with their campus software platforms.  And, all five of the top winners were similarly highly innovative in terms of what they enable faculty, students and/or administrators to do – and that’s what this is all about – making innovation easier!

Q: Isn’t a non-connected app just as innovative?

A: Nice try, but not really. “Innovation” is not just about whether an application is novel.  It also has to be useful (in fact some definitions of the word take into account adoption/usage as a critical aspect of innovation). Apps that are easy to access and use are a lot more useful in the education space than those that aren’t. Having to enter student roster data or having separate logins or going to a different URL for an app is not at all cool. But, more importantly, these extra steps detract from the innovativeness. Faculty and students need to focus on learning and not on configuring software.

Q: Is the 1EdTech Connected Learning Innovation Challenge going to become an annual thing?

A: Yes. We are on an annual schedule of app boot camp for developers at our August quarterly meeting, promotion at Fall EDUCAUSE, promotion at Winter EDUCAUSE ELI and announcement of annual winners during the run-up to the annual Learning Impact event in May.

Q: Is 1EdTech going to do more to make it easier to find apps than the current LTI catalog web page?

A: Yes. The Connected Learning Innovation Community is also sponsoring the Community App Sharing/Store Architecture (CASA) project. Indeed, CASA is more than a whitepaper!  It is open source software that is being developed by a collaborating group of 1EdTech HED institutions, led by UCLA and the University of California System.  CASA is a breakthrough. It’s a peer-to-peer app sharing architecture that will enable institutions or suppliers to partake in a network of  cross-platform educational app sharing. The very first public demonstrations of CASA will occur at the 1EdTech Learning Impact Leadership Institute May 5-8, 2014 in New Orleans. For more background on CASA see this post.

Q: Is the Connected Learning Innovation Community (CLIC) meant to be an open source community?

A: Yes. 1EdTech expects that for those institutions or suppliers that wish to share and collaborate on open source apps, tools or platforms that implement the 1EdTech standards CLIC will evolve into a vibrant software collaboration. We like to say that this is like “an open source community on steroids” because the software developed will run cross-platform. So, whereas the current open source collaborations like Sakai and Moodle have been and will continue to be great, this is a different kind of community that adds a completely new dimension of cross-platform/cross-community.

Q: Where is the K-12 community in this? A: 1EdTech expects that K-12 institutions and/or states will begin to participate – it’s only a matter of time and resources.  HED has taken the lead here because HED institutions are developing lots of LTI apps on their own. And, HED is more used to these sort of development collaborations. But K-12 is coming.  

Today 1EdTech released our annual report for the calendar and fiscal year 2013.   See the press release.  See the annual report.

1EdTech annual report 2013 cover

Producing an annual report is a lot of work – and these days when it seems like very few people have time to read one might ask why do we take the time and effort to do this? We first published an annual report for the year 2009 – so 2013 is the fifth edition.

1EdTech annual report 2009 cover

I think there were really two catalysts that got us to publish the report.

The first was that after I came into 1EdTech as the CEO in 2006 it became obvious that not even the Board of Directors much less all stakeholders in 1EdTech were getting accurate financial data and other metrics on the organization. First we corrected the situation for the Board but then the Board also vowed that we should be providing this information to the members and the stakeholders.

The second catalyst was Jan Posten Day, who at the time was with Blackboard, and is now with Pearson. As a member of one of our leadership committees in 1EdTech Jan was adamant that 1EdTech should have an annual report. At the time Jan suggested this we were struggling to keep the organization afloat and I pushed back on the idea because it just seemed like we could not pull it off.  But Jan’s insistence made an impression on myself and the other staff – and I think it was within a year or so that we dug deep and got out the 2009 report.

As you will see in this year’s report, 1EdTech has been growing nicely now for eight consecutive years. 1EdTech growth through 2013  

In fact, even though there has been quite a bit of churn in the member base over that time, the consistency in the net growth has been a little scary. It’s scary because we have looked long and hard and have not found any other similar growth pattern in organizations similar to 1EdTech. Indeed during this same period most other organizations classified as “standards consortia” have generally been flat to declining. And, if you look at the historical patterns for standards consortia they tend to grow very rapidly when first originated and then flatten or tail off.

So, 1EdTech is an organization in unchartered territory. In my mind it is all about leadership in terms of which way it will go. 1EdTech has provided a viable organization for those organizations, institutions and suppliers, who wish to evolve an unprecedented collaboration to new heights. Or, those afraid of the disruption that 1EdTech is enabling may slow it down. Everyday I see forces on both sides of that equation and think it’s going to be very interesting indeed as we go forward.

However, I assure you that, means willing, 1EdTech will be publishing the report whether or not the results are as rosy as they have been.  Indeed when we began publishing the report we had no idea that the chart data would keep going up for the next 5 years!

But, here’s why I think the report is useful and why you should give it a look:

  1. In one relatively short document you get a full view of the work of 1EdTech – which is not easy to see if you are focused on one or a few 1EdTech initiatives.
  2. You can see how the organization is doing in terms of building momentum and in terms of financial strength.
  3. You can get a great a very summary of the major thrust of 1EdTech and the key initiatives - and a concise commentary on why we are doing what we do.
  4. You can see the individuals and organizations that are leading 1EdTech.
  5. It is a format that can be easily shared with someone else whom you might want to introduce the organization to or update on 1EdTech progress.

1EdTech architectiure

Hopefully the experience of perusing the report should give you a sense that 1EdTech is indeed a non-profit organization worthy of your support because 1EdTech is changing the education and learning sectors for the better.  And, if you look at the range of initiatives that 1EdTech is undertaking you can feel pride in that your support has made this progress possible. I assure you that without your support this work would not have happened – not only not have happened in 1EdTech, but most likely would not have happened anywhere. 1EdTech is that unique in the leadership and collaboration for progress to the education and learning sectors.

As with most “things 1EdTech” the annual report is a testament to leadership. Not the leadership of the 1EdTech staff, but the leadership of the 1EdTech members, both organizations and individuals (like Jan Day above) who are insistent that we must do better in enabling the next generation of education and learning! 1EdTech community

Please excuse the long time since the last blog folks.  1EdTech is adding a lot of new members and staff supporting an unprecedented array of exciting initiatives – which has kept yours truly very busy the last few months.

We are now in the final push toward our annual Learning Impact event, May 5-8 in New Orleans, USA. While this is also a busy time we’ve got a great chance at the event and before to be talking about where we are and where we are going in 1EdTech. We hope you will join the conversation! Consider this a first installment.

The (perhaps) provocative title of this post is actually one that we are sometimes asked. After all, 1EdTech is very much a “bottoms-up” meritocracy, like many other organizations that develop interoperability standards. Most of the ideas in 1EdTech, and certainly the best ideas, come from the individuals that are participating on behalf of their member organizations.  And, 1EdTech is a true membership organization (legally organized as such) that provides a level playing field for organizations of all sizes – a construct that we think provides a very good structure for what we do as previously described here. So, when the members speak – we listen – and usually act.

1EdTech does have a strategy. 1EdTech has an elected Board of Directors that helps formulate the strategy. But, the strategy is very organic, flowing and dynamic. New ideas brought forward by the members go through a certain “due diligence” that occurs by putting the idea in front of key stakeholders – those most motivated to act – and adjusting accordingly (including sometimes putting on the shelf until further interest). Having much experience in the venture capital world I will tell you that it is much like the funneling of ideas/business plans that every VC firm goes through in terms of the process of looking at the risks and opportunities involved.

So, the resulting 1EdTech strategy is a function of bubbling up, testing (against the critical concepts of adoption and learning impact) and organizing into something as coherent as we can make it given what is actually happening in the sector and various sub-segments.  And occasionally adding some key missing pieces that for whatever reason have not bubbled up – like for instance members not willing to share in an area that is actually good for them to share.

For several years past this process unfolded into an 1EdTech strategy centered on what we have called the “Digital Learning Services” standards, focused on (but not limited to) Common Cartridge, Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) and Learning Information Services (LIS).

The strategic theory behind the DLS focus was that together these standards would solve a very large percentage of the integration challenges in/with the education enterprise.  And, in fact, while different pieces have evolved and been adopted at differing rates, we think this thesis has largely turned out to be on target.  See the accompanying charts on growth in 1EdTech membership during this strategy and growth more recently in the conformance certifications that are the market adoption proof point.  Notice the 97 certifications in 2013 – almost 2 a week. So far in 2014 we are averaging close to 3 a week. In other words, this strategy is still taking hold, but clearly it is taking hold in a big way!

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However, the 1EdTech strategy has definitely shifted beyond DLS in the last year or so. First of all, e-assessment, an area 1EdTech has had some activity in for a long while via QTI (and a subset of which is covered in Common Cartridge) became a hot area. The very simple idea that electronic assessments if done right are much more affordable and scalable than paper assessments coupled with the very obvious idea that there should be open formats to enable the e-assessment ecosystem of suppliers and states has come of age (both in the U.S. and other nations such as the Netherlands). Second, now that the 1EdTech DLS standards are working – radically reducing cost, time, complexity of seamless integration – our attention is naturally now turning to what can be enabled with the standards.

While there may not be complete agreement in the 1EdTech community (given its size and diverse nature) over what we should be enabling with the standards, here are the current thoughts – and thus, the strategy going forward:

  1. The power of LTI (first v1 and now v2) to reduce cost and time of achieving seamless integration by 10-1000x will soon lead to 1-click integration.  1EdTech-enabled applications will be auto negotiating which 1EdTech services are supported – thus revolutionizing the ease with which standards-based applications will be incorporated into the teaching and learning process.
  2. #1 enabling a very diverse open ecosystem of new types of learning platforms and applications and potentially rearranging the ordering of  integrations – very much an “app to app”  model of cooperation with or without a learning management “system” in the middle.
  3. Merging LTI with the 1EdTech work on student information (LIS) and course planning and scheduling (CPS) exchange to continue to open up the educational enterprise via easy to use standards.
  4. Establishing and growing the “educational app community” – like an open source community on steroids that builds things that work across platforms (the “things” may be open source or not, but there should be tools to enable this that are open source). This is a remarkable new type of community indeed – suppliers and institutions working together across platform – kind of like the worldwide web but focused on the education vertical.
  5. Enabling what most refer to as e-books or e-texts as a highly interoperable format across a wide variety of e-readers/mobile devices for the needs of learning and education.  See EDUPUB.
  6. Making instrumentation / measurement of learning activities easy to enable collection of analytics – big and small data. See Caliper Analytics.
  7. Including everything we’ve learned and are learning about e-assessment across #4-6, meaning that we’ve got the standards to enable innovative assessment apps, enable assessment in e-text and the enable easy instrumentation of assessment in learning platforms and apps (via Caliper and the outcomes standards developed on QTI/APIP).
  8. Utilize the standards to create an open source reference implementation for a peer-to-peer app sharing framework that can be used to do, well, what it says – share apps with trusted partners and encourage using standards to do this – thus, the enabling of a standards-based “app store” or “app sharing” equivalent to iTunes, etc. See CASA.

Perhaps though, most importantly, 1EdTech is making great progress with our end-user/institutional led groups to ensure that all of these initiatives are in fact getting them where they want to go.  Our K-12 district advisory board (I3LC) continues to grow and our new HED connected learning advisory board is shepherding the app community, the app sharing architecture, analytics and competency-based learning initiatives.

Hopefully you will see the evolution of the 1EdTech strategy in the above. The 1EdTech community is making change happen in some very substantial ways and I invite you to partake at the May 5-8 Learning Impact event – where the breakout tracks mirror the strategy areas above and the plenary sessions undertake the broader discussion  of “why” we are doing this in terms of the emergent models of education that we wish to enable.

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