Editor's note: this is a guest post provided by Steve Kessinger, Director of IST, Bluefield College.

Online learning continues to evolve, keeping even the most accomplished educators on their toes. There are numerous tools and resources available to supplement online education and I'm sure your faculty, like ours are becoming more interested in these resources. They also expect them to be fully integrated within the course.

The technical challenges to a small school like Bluefield College can be overwhelming which is why we were excited to hear about the Learning Tools Portlet in Jenzabar e-Learning. So many vendors have boasted “sure, we integrate with your system” but what that really translates to is “we integrate with your system as long as your IT guys spend 6 months in a cave banging out code”. We have a total staff of 3.5 FTE; we just don’t have time for that. Using the 1EdTech Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, we now have the ability to integrate a number of solutions that we once thought were beyond our capability. And it’s easy!

It only takes a simple click to get started (+ Add a new learning tool).

User Window within Jenzabar JICS for Integrating an LTI Tool/Application 1 of 2

Then, all we need is a link, key, and secret provided to us by the vendor and we’re ready to go.

User Window within Jenzabar JICS for Integrating an LTI Tool/Application 2 of 2

We’ve even started recommending LTI compliance to vendors. It’s a real return on investment for us and for them. We get the advantage of being able to integrate a number of tremendous products into our learning environment and we don’t have to use our limited resources on custom integrations since LTI is so easy. It’s also advantageous to the vendor since it allows them to serve other Jenzabar e-Learning customers and other LTI compliant LMS solutions. We’re currently testing LTI resources and we’re hoping that we can have some of these tools incorporated in courses for the Spring.

The annual EDUCAUSE conference is a bit of a marker for 1EdTech. Once a project within EDUCAUSE (begun in 1995), 1EdTech spun out in 1999 as its own non-profit member consortium.  So, we try to have a presence each year at the conference and take stock. Adoption of 1EdTech standards is exploding across K-20 right now: Common Cartridge, Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), Learning Information Services (LIS) and Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP).

Rob Abel, 1EdTech & Derek Hamner of Learning Objects Talk 1EdTech Revolution

It’s been interesting to see the evolution of 1EdTech over the past few years at EDUCAUSE from a techie topic to now a strategy topic as well. As the world economy slowly recovers, digital content and apps make their way into education, and a growing wave of excitement and investment in new companies and products, some of the institutional leaders are asking the right strategic question: how do I better serve my customers in this new world? 

This year at EDUCAUSE for the first time (in the next several years I expect) we began referring to 1EdTech as a “revolution.”

One of Three 1EdTech Revolution Banners at EDUCAUSE 2012

In my humble opinion, it is the type of revolution that education needs: one that solves some immediate tactical issues, improves efficiency from day one, but also puts in place a strategy that enables better service from IT to the end-users in this increasingly digital and mobile world. Most importantly it is a revolution focused on impact of technology in improving the success of the teachers and students.

It’s helping to enable and catalyze change in education that 1EdTech is most interested in – but, we are interested in sustainable change. Change that is not a fad or blip in the long history of educational institutions, but rather a new foundation. The specific change we’re interested in making happen is to drive the time and cost of integration of innovative digital content and applications in the education space as close to zero as it can get. If we do that – as an 1EdTech community – many good things follow: a more open market, more innovation, more expenditures on educational technology versus other less innovative things, less waste on every supplier and every institution “reinventing the integration wheel.”

Here are my top five takeaways from this year’s conference as it relates to the 1EdTech mission – which are based on a combination of things talked about openly at the conference as well as privately:

1EdTech Adoption is Accelerating

1. The 1EdTech revolution is viral now with most HED suppliers. We were showing the chart of growth to over 125 1EdTech certifications issued in the last couple of years and my rough guess is that this is about 50% of the actual adoption of 1EdTech in the market. At this point, if a supplier is not in some way taking advantage of the 10-100x cost and time advantage of 1EdTech (see 1EdTech revolution blog post) – well, they are at a significant disadvantage. It is pretty hard to find an education-focused supplier that is not on board – whether they are actually an 1EdTech member or not.  The suppliers that are not are typically the large “non-educational” companies that have development groups that basically don’t care about education. This category of companies is really missing the boat because with a little amount of work they could really endear themselves to our education market – but it is just the way they are set up: the development organizations within them are focused on non-education needs and that typically means their own proprietary platforms.
2. CIOs that are "leaders of change" get the 1EdTech value proposition – and because there is a critical mass of them, we will start to see more institutional policy supporting adoption of standards – in fact, we already are. 10x-100x improvement in cost and time of integrating digital content and apps would seem to be a total no-brainer. But, let’s face it, most edu CIOs run more on fear of uncertainty than they do opportunity for making change happen. So be it.  If we needed 100% or even a majority of CIOs to get the benefits of standards and why they actually need to do something about it – well, let’s just say I would have thrown in the towel a long time ago.  1EdTech has a core group of true leaders, some CIOs and some in executive positions focused on educational technology in institutions that get it and are helping us roll out an initiative called THESIS (Technology in HED in Support of Innovation for Student Success). This program will be a collaboration of leaders to lead institutional adoption. In 1EdTech almost seven years now I have found that any size or type of institution (or school district or state) can lead but it depends on having someone in charge who is capable of truly leading.  It’s the people in charge that matter and not the size or type of institution.
3. Some apple carts are going to get upset in the short term (1-3 years). This is why 1EdTech is a real revolution. Some suppliers make money from integrations being “difficult or perceived as difficult.” However, once a cat is out of the bag it is hard to put it back in. One way or the other IT is going to become “easy” in the education segments. It has to. Most colleges and school districts – even those perceived as large – are small in terms of technical resources. The users are not technical.  They need simple and easy. The good news is that there is a lot of opportunity for suppliers in making the revolution happen.  But, this is not just a supplier apple cart issue.  This is also a CIO apple cart issue – the one’s that have said to me: “We already have people that do custom integrations, so more efficient integration doesn’t save us anything.”  Oops. Wrong answer! If a CIO or other technology executive is focused on the customer (students, teachers, even administrators), as opposed to their own or somebody else’s job security, they will embrace this change. However, see point #2 above. I can only tell you that this is a change that is going to happen – it’s as predictable as the outsourcing of email was – so, in the longer run embracing and moving with it is probably a better career strategy for all concerned.
4. There is a lot of concern about the amount of private equity in this marketplace. Everyone seems to get it (somewhat to my surprise, I might say) that private equity firms are typically “not friends of investing in innovation.” All I can say is that ultimately, if this turns out to be true (and I sincerely hope it does not), it will create more opportunity for up and coming innovative suppliers. In either case open standards from 1EdTech are going to play a huge role.  What most people don’t get is that the “giant” suppliers in education are really pretty small. Of the $1.4 trillion revenue annually in the U.S. related to education (2012 estimate), well, only 3% is spent on technology of any kind.   Another way to think of it is that if you looked at the operating budgets of all 4000 universities in the U.S. – it is estimated to be about $535 billion.  Since there are very few educational suppliers or education segment suppliers within larger companies that ever make it to $1 billion annual revenue, well, it's clear that the “big dog” in this market are the institutions themselves. The institutions are really, in the big picture of things, the primary “suppliers” of revenue-producing goods (non-profit, for-profit or whatever). This is an important follow on point to 1-3 above in that higher education institutions are potentially in “control of their own destiny” when it comes to greater innovation and getting technology that meets the needs of teaching and learning. They do, however, need to coordinate to some degree. Reality is that this is what groups like 1EdTech are good for – and in our case I’d say it is all the better because supportive suppliers are around the table. It is the whole community of institutions and educational suppliers that are going to create the future. I hope!  The alternative is Google or Apple come in from the outside and take over.  Think iTunes U equals the primary distribution point for education. What a nightmare! Lock-in is tolerable for individuals, but not institutions.
5. “Happy talk” keynotes are inspiring, but leave us a little empty after all is said and done: Many points of light do not get us to a bon fire of change! It’s fun to watch the inspirational tweets when someone like Clay Shirkey speaks. Of course, it’s good to feel good and empowered that we can do it! We can be innovative!  We can stick it to the man! Etc. Me too! I’m sure there is a positive subliminal effect from this sort of thing.  A little more sobering was this year’s data from the man with data about higher ed IT, Casey Green, which included the chart shown below that shows a very large discrepancy between the perceived return on IT investment among college presidents, provosts and CIOs. I encourage you to get more information at CampusComputing.net. The one sentence summary is that where CIOs may think they are getting reasonable return on the investment in IT, well, their customers, ah, not so much. The bottom line, IT needs to do better - either in terms of communicating the value or providing the value, or both.  Since few, if any, IT shops are getting more resourced going forward, well, it really is a time to “do better with less.”  Notice I did not say “more” – because this is really about giving customers what they want/need – not about more mindless technology expenditures.   I really don’t know any other way to make this happen than to become less reactive and more thoughtful about where things are going and putting in place a better operational foundation going forward. That, of course, is what the IT leaders involved in 1EdTech are doing – and I’m pleased that our organization has a very clear value proposition and ROI with respect to institutional participation.  10-100x cost and time savings on integrations is a big time “better.”

And there you have it.  A lot of this 1EdTech open digital innovation revolution stuff is of the famous “think globally and act locally” kind. There are definitely some things out there that help you (in the singular sense) and help you (in the plural sense). That would be the 1EdTech revolution. The revolution will not be televised.  Made possible by the 1EdTech member organizations.  

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 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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, 1EdTech 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, 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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 1EdTech e-textbook task force is focusing on this. The 2^nd 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.  1EdTech 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. 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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.  1EdTech 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. 1EdTech 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 1EdTech 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 1EdTech Member organizations for your leadership on this journey. 

1EdTech is very good at fostering collaboration, even among competitors, and we have a crucial role to play.  

Well, they're out there live:

The new Learning Tools Interoperability Web Pages

Why did 1EdTech put these out there?

1. It's Summer and we're tired of vacationing (not really - we really need more vacation)

2. We wanted some pages about LTI that were less "1EdTech speak" and more down to normal human propeller head level

3. We wanted a cool catalog like thingy that showed what learning platforms (consumers) and tools (producers) were out there and 1EdTech certified (meaning that they have passed our tests and willing to work with 1EdTech as a neutral party if there are any integration issues) more clearly than our master conformance certification table. I was recently at a meeting of the University of California ETLG where we discussed the need for such a thing and enhancements the community could make to it . . .

4. Extensions: We are aware that there are quite a few very useful extensions out there that need to be folded into the specification and conformance. We wanted a place to collect those.  This will be a major topic of discussion at the upcoming 1EdTech meetings in August in Ann Arbor - all are invited (also having a great LTI implementation workshop there  - really about implementation - not Dr. Chuck's LTI life story :-) which of course we love but we figure everyone has heard now ). We will be compiling a list of products and the various extensions they support as we rev LTI version 1.

In short this is a series of pages that we hope will help people rapidly understand LTI and begin to implement it - as well as for certified suppliers to some space to show their wares to the growing community of LTI advocates/adopters.

Enjoy!