IMS Global Announces Ground-Breaking Initiative by Leading Organizations to Create a Highly Interoperable Assessment Ecosystem to Accelerate Transition to e-Assessment

Newly Formed Group of Executives Pledge to Establish a Highly Interoperable End-to-End Assessment Architecture to Enable Growth of e-Assessment Content, Applications, and Innovation

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Lake Mary, Florida - 4 May 2015 - IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global/IMS), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and impact, announces the formation of the Executive Board on Assessment (EBA). The EBA’s mission is to set industry direction for years to come and to accelerate the transition to e-assessment by building on the success of the QTI®v2 (Question & Test Interoperability® v2) and APIP® (Accessible Portable Item Profile®) standards to improve content portability, outcomes data interoperability, enable deeper integration with assistive technologies, and remove barriers to accelerate industry adoption of assessment standards. 

Over the last several years there has been aggressive movement toward digital assessment that is being spurred by state and national programs, such as Race to the Top Assessment (RTTA) in the U.S. Indeed IMS Global has seen great progress in the market over the last three years as a result of industry adoption of the IMS QTIv2 and APIP standards, as demonstrated by PARCC in delivering to date over 7.5 million tests using QTI and APIP.  There is now additional demand by states and school districts to evolve the standards to improve portability and interoperability of assessment content and to remove the barriers to achieving industry-wide conformance.

The newly formed EBA group will serve as an extension of the IMS Board of Directors and will be chaired by Open Assessment Technologies (OAT) Co-Founder and CEO, Marc Oswald.  Participation is open to all IMS Contributing Member organizations, but requires an executive pledge to provide the leadership and resources needed to lead the market in charting the next phase of IMS standards to build strong end-to-end interoperability, make portable content a reality, and accelerate standards compliance. Charter members include ACT, CITO, College voor Toetsen en Examens, ETS, Florida Virtual School, Houston ISD, McGraw-Hill Education, Measured Progress, Minnesota Department of Education, National Center and State Collaborative (NCSC), NWEA, Open Assessment Technologies (OAT),  Pacific Metrics, PARCC, Questar Assessment, Smarter Balanced, and WIDA. 

"With the accelerated adoption of e-assessment all around the world it is absolutely critical that as an industry we advance the usability and end-to-end interoperability of e-assessment solutions," said Marc Oswald, Co-Founder and CEO of Open Assessment Technologies (OAT). "The EBA will address this head-on by providing additional QTI 2.x compliance levels that will make it easier for users to match content with platforms. In addition, the EBA will organize collaborative Plugfests during which content and platform vendors work together to establish end-to-end interoperability while new versions of the standard are being finalized."

"A key point that needs to be understood is that many of the suppliers and end-users organizations that have been attracted to adopt the APIP and QTI standards to date have not been the creators of the standards.  Therefore, as we move to the next phase there is opportunity to motivate leadership from a set of leading e-Assessment organizations to take charge of the next phase," said Rob Abel, Chief Executive Officer of IMS Global. "To do this there must be more than "technical" ownership.  There must be alignment of business and technical strategy to drive this work forward to meet market needs."

IMS Global and the EBA charter members will provide further information regarding the group’s mission, objectives, and milestones this week during the IMS Learning Impact Leadership Institute, May 4-7 in Atlanta and in the coming months.  Contact EBA@imsglobal.org for additional information.

Statements of industry commitment and support

"Houston Independent School District (HISD) has committed to align the selection criteria for digital resources with the IMS Global Interoperability Standards.  This allows for mapping of learning objectives according to Texas and other curriculum standards and minimize interoperability challenges stemming from various proprietary formats.  As an extension to this commitment, HISD is pleased to become a Charter Member of the IMS Executive Board on Assessment (EBA) whose mission is to promote QTI e assessment interoperability standard. We strongly encourage our vendors to adopt this open, ubiquitous standard for test development, delivery, scoring, and reporting," said Leng Fritsche, Ph.D., Assistant Superintendent of Student Assessment, HISD.

"Pacific Metrics is committed to creating meaningful content and providing a full range of software solutions to support efficient assessment delivery. We believe that the value of learning and assessment content becomes much greater when it is portable. Given our long history of supporting open standards and creating open software, we are delighted to be a Charter Member of the IMS Executive Board on Assessment (EBA). Through the EBA, we will continue to address assessment innovation and will advocate for the adoption of practical standards that facilitate the interoperability of high-quality e-Assessments and items. We look forward to working collaboratively with the EBA members to accelerate the creation and adoption of standards that will have a positive impact on learning outcomes worldwide," said Bill Mistretta, Vice President for Service and Technology Operations, Pacific Metrics.

"The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is committed to improving the practice of academic assessment through the use of open source software, open standards, and strong cooperation between organizations. To this end, Smarter Balanced has invested in a complete online assessment software suite and released the software as open source and openly-licensed specifications. Smarter Balanced has adopted many standards and is actively improving compatibility with IMS QTI and APIP. IMS Global serves a vital need by organizing the community to collaborate on common standards and supporting the adoption of standards with fidelity. Smarter Balanced therefore applauds the creation of the new IMS Executive Board on Assessment and is pleased to be among its Charter Members, working collaboratively to advance content interoperability based on the QTI and APIP standards. As Smarter Balanced invests in innovative new assessment technology, it also commits to sharing that technology with the IMS community and supporting its incorporation into future standards," said Brandt Redd, Chief Technology Officer at Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

"Questar Assessment supports innovation and open standards — in our own work and that of IMS Global. That’s why I am honoured to be the company’s representative on the Executive Board of Assessment and have the opportunity to collaborate with other charter members to lead the development of the next generation of K–12 assessment standards, technologies and best practices," said Keith Koch, Questar Assessment’s Chief Technology Officer.

"For years, Cito has played an active role in the promotion of QTI. It has become an integral part of Questify, Cito’s platform for assessment construction and delivery, and we have already seen the advantages of this interoperability standard in working with our clients and partners," said Mark Molenaar, Head of Information Management, Cito. "For example, for the Dutch government we have developed the Dutch Exam Profile (DEP), a QTI based standard. Cito is proud to be one of the Charter Members of the IMS Executive Board on Assessment in support of this initiative and to collaborate with leaders in the industry for the further development of this industry standard."

"State and consortia assessment programs invest significant resources and effort in test content. The benefits of content ownership are severely limited when digital content is structured to be compatible with a single proprietary system. Anyone who has transitioned an assessment program’s content from one testing vendor to another knows what a costly and time consuming process it is. Going forward, those responsible for assessment programs must require that their content be easily ported among systems for item development, item banking, online test delivery, and scoring and reporting. The Minnesota Department of Education therefore joins the IMS Executive Board on Assessment (EBA) as a Charter Member with the mission to improve the interoperability of assessment content and to further the adoption of QTI through its technology selection process," said Cheryl Alcaya, Test Development Supervisor, Minnesota Department of Education.

"The Dutch government states that the use of open standards is crucial for the improvement of interoperability and supplier independence. The Department of Education in the Netherlands embraces open standards for test interoperability. They offer good opportunities for schools, teachers and test developers to cooperate and easily exchange content and scoring models. The National Exam board of the Netherlands (named College voor Toetsen en Examens - CvTE) has chosen QTI as the open test interoperability standard for its own system (Facet) to be able to work with multiple content providers in a consistent way. The CvTE is pleased to be a Charter Member of the IMS Executive Board on Assessment (EBA). We believe that the EBA will play a key role in improving the quality, the user-friendliness and the interoperability of the QTI standard and will contribute to a broader adoption," said Nynke de Boer, Manager Computer-based Exams, College voor Toetsen en Examens.

"WIDA is honored to be a charter member of the IMS Executive Board on Assessment," said Carsten Wilmes, Assessment Director for WIDA, an assessment consortium housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We want to contribute to interoperability from the end-user perspective and look forward to having technology standards in place to allow for better test item sharing among our platform providers."

"ETS has been a longtime supporter of open standards and IMS from its very beginning by contributing the Evidence Centered Design foundation upon which QTI is based," says Gary Driscoll, ETS Senior Strategic Advisor IT. "We are pleased to be a member of the new IMS Executive Board of Assessment and are looking forward to collaborating with the other charter members. "The convergence of QTI and APIP into the new aQTI is a key milestone in the evolution of assessment standards," Driscoll adds. "The new standard will improve consistency as well as portability of content and user experience. This will safeguard educational organizations’ investments in their digital assessment content by enabling it to be ported among systems for item development, item banking, online test delivery, and scoring and reporting."

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global)IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology.  The2015 Learning Impact Leadership Institutewill be held May 4-7 in Atlanta, Georgia.

IMS Global Announces K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystem Initiative

Leading U.S. K-12 Technology Suppliers and School Districts Pledge to Support and Promote an Interoperable Ecosystem of Educational Apps, Digital Resources and Learning Systems

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Lake Mary, Florida, USA - May 5, 2015 - IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global / IMS) today announced the formation of a new initiative aimed at communicating the benefits and availability of open interoperability to school leaders.  Incorporation of IMS standards at leading school districts such as Gwinnett County, Georgia, Houston Independent School District, Texas, and Orange County, Florida have significantly improved the access to digital learning resources for teachers and students.  A group of IMS members, led by the IMS Board of Directors, believes that it is time to expand the reach of the open architecture and its benefits to a majority of U.S. school districts.

K-12 organization membership in IMS Global, the global leader in education technology interoperability and impact, today accounts for 45% of the total membership and will likely pass 50% by the end of 2015. The IMS K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystem Initiative will be led by the IMS K-12 leadership council (known as the I3LC). The initiative will also include new technical collaboration to speed adoption of open standards such as sharing of code that provides integration into legacy systems.

“School leaders need to know that they can trust that an ecosystem of interoperable digital curriculum, tools, apps and learning platforms that enables a more personalized student experience based on open standards is taking shape rapidly and that their districts can begin implementation with a few simple steps,” said Dr. Rob Abel, Chief Executive Officer of IMS Global. “The purpose of the IMS K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystem is to get a majority of U.S. districts on a road that will provide them many options for innovation and protection of their technology and curriculum investments into the future.”

Gwinnett County Public Schools
“As a current board member of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) committed over a year ago to support, make use of, and implement the IMS Global standards for interaction between learning systems. The delivery of conformance certified LTI 1.0 capability into the GCPS portal environment is an important first step in the drive toward easier, lower-cost, and deep integration with our learning content. This work supports the promise of access to learning environments and learning content from anywhere inside or outside the enterprise and achievement of the district’s digital transformation initiative. In addition, the Gwinnett County Public School System recently became the first K-12 school system to have an LTI conformance certified environment with IMS Global.” - Dr. Steve Flynt, Chief Strategy and Performance Officer

Houston Independent School District
“The IMS Global Learning Tools Interoperability standards are a critical component of Houston ISD’s digital transformation. Through LTI®, Common Cartridge® and Thin Common Cartridge®, HISD is making high quality content from multiple vendors available for searching by topics, concepts and TEKS (education standards) inside the district’s learning platform. In addition, thanks to meta-tagging specs, the platform can provide a formative assessment function by recommending content for mastery of learning, based on individual answers to specific assessment questions. All this is done by logging into one platform. Not only do IMS Global standards create a more effective teaching and learning environment, they also provide effective and economic solutions. Historically, HISD has built customized rostering integrations to suit each learning tool vendor’s individual needs, an extremely expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive approach. Now that we have adopted IMS Global’s OneRoster standard, we anticipate reducing requirements gathering and development time by 75% - 95% for new rostering integration requests.” - Lenny Schad, Chief Technology Information Officer

Orange County Public Schools
“As school districts move towards personalized learning one of the areas often overlooked that ironically stands as one of the most critical areas of attention is the ease of access to their digital core curricular materials. While strides have been made to address the lack of digital access overall, each ecosystem brings its own silo of information and data that a school system desperately needs use. The IMS Global K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystem Initiative allows districts to have a common voice in their push to have publishers and content providers give district access to content in ways that are helpful and useful to them. Personalized learning is becomes an almost insurmountable mountain if content and data integration is not available and standards across systems. IMS Global is laying the foundation to make sure that the steep mountain becomes a gentle slope for school systems.” - Maurice Draggon, Director, Instructional Management System

Florida Virtual School
“Florida Virtual School has been a strong supporter of IMS Global's work to lead the way in educational technology interoperability. Open standards have allowed us to reduce internal costs through a reduction of proprietary integrations. Interoperability standards have also allowed us to easily support the needs of our FLVS Global clients by quickly integrating our content with many learning management systems. We look forward to the IMS K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystem Initiative paving the way for other schools to embrace open standards.” - Jodi Marshall, Executive Vice President, Business & School Solutions

Escambia County School District
“Personalized learning requires adequate resources from which students should choose the most appropriate to meet their learning needs and interests. Use of open, interoperable systems is the best way for districts to provide the depth of resources to make a personalized learning environment a reality.” - Tom Ingram, Director of Information Technology

Fulton County Schools
“We rely on IMS-Global to set the standards for how content and data work with our critical district systems and ensure efficiency and longevity of our investment. At this point we are requiring all relevant vendors to be compliant.” - Serena E Sacks, Chief Information Officer

Poway Unified School District
“My Superintendent laid out a vision at the beginning of this school year that we will be a personalized learning district in five years at all our schools. This is only possible with the promise of an Open EdTech Ecosystem.” - Robert J. Gravina, Chief Technology Officer

School District of Pickens County
“In the School District of Pickens County, our goal is to provide students and teachers with a digital ecosystem that meets the teaching and learning demands of the 21st Century. For us this means a robust infrastructure that supports interoperable digital resources that work on any end-user device. We are committed to giving our teachers and students a central hub with single sign-on access to their digital resources. With digital curriculum, tools, apps and learning platforms working together seamlessly, we enable our teachers to personalize learning experiences for students.” - Barbara Nesbitt, Ph.D., Director of Instructional Technology

Forsyth County Schools
“The IMS global standards have already allowed us to take significant strides towards integrating all of our digital resources into one virtual learning commons. Moving forward, we envision these standards being at the heart of a powerful personalized learning system that will empower our teachers to meet each student’s educational needs.” - Lessell Martiny (Marty) Bray Ph.D.
Chief Technology and Information Officer

Newton Public Schools
"The adoption of IMS standards and the Open EdTech Ecosystem as part of our practice will ensure our ability to blend the best of breed together and effectively deliver a rich learning experience to our learning community" - Leo Brehm, Director of Information Technology and Library Media

McGraw-Hill Education
“McGraw-Hill Education is pleased to be a partner in the K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystem Initiative. As highlighted in our recent announcement (http://www.mheducation.com/about/news-room/mcgraw-hill-education-takes-important-step-open-technology-enabling-educators-build) of Compound Learning Objects and our strategic commitment to open learning via IMS standards, we look forward to the industry coalescing around open and interoperable implementations. We are thrilled to support initiatives that work in service of our learners and teachers to make technology easier to use. McGraw-Hill Education is grateful to the leadership of the extended IMS community in driving a learning environment that is based on a true ecosystem of collaborators and an ecosystem that makes it easy to construct digital learning experiences.” - Stephen Laster, Chief Digital Officer

Pearson
“As a leading digital curriculum and learning platform provider, Pearson firmly supports the IMS K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystem as a direct way to make curriculum offerings easier to integrate for our customers and more valuable for teachers and learners.” - Marc Nelson, VP Technology Product Management

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
“As a Global Learning Company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is committed to providing best-in-class content for its customers through a variety of systems. HMH continues our commitment to supporting IMS Global and the education community by dedicating resources to help drive the adoption and evolution of the IMS standards and specifications. The new
K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystem provides a focused opportunity to remove friction and improve the user experience for pre-K-12 students. HMH looks forward to the Open EdTech Ecosystem creating even more ways for customers ­ students, teachers, administrators, and parents ­ to leverage our dynamic learning content.” - Claudia Reuter, Vice President HMH Labs

SMART Technologies
“SMART has been committed to supporting IMS standards since 2011, when we initially received the interactive whiteboard standard certification for our SMART Notebook software,” says Linda Thomas, IMS board member and Vice-President, Planning and Business Analysis, SMART Technologies. “Our new education software, SMART amp, takes classroom software to the cloud in a new way - providing rich, digital, manageable collaborative experiences that foster natural learning between students and teachers. SMART fully supports the K12 Open EdTech Ecosystem initiative, providing simple, seamless interoperability between SMART amp and other leading education software, apps and content.”

SAFARI Montage
“The IMS standard creates a k12 educational ecosystem that does not just support digital content but supports protection of district-created content as well.  Finally in k12 education we have an integration of full Classroom interoperability to make a district roadmap for digital resources work!!!!” - Tim Beekman, President

D2L
“D2L believes strongly in making teaching and learning easier and smarter by supporting a rich technology and content ecosystem. Open interoperability and standards are a key part of building a truly flexible learning platform to support that ecosystem, and IMS is the place where that happens.” - Jeremy Auger, Chief Strategy Officer

Learning.com
“As early adopters of the LTI and Thin Common Cartridge standards, Learning.com supports our customers by ensuring our digital content and curriculum tools integrate with multiple learning systems,” says senior product manager and IMS Global liaison Andy Miller. “We are excited to support the IMS K-12 Open EdTech Ecosystems initiative and will continue to provide solutions that help districts innovate and deliver high quality teaching and learning experiences.” - Andy Miller, Senior Product Manager

Classlink
“When it comes to data exchange in K-12, it feels like the Middle Ages. We have fiefdoms of costly and proprietary systems requiring the creation of handwrought data files by candlelight. It’s just not sustainable to continue to operate like this,” said Berj Akian, Founder and CEO of ClassLink. “Educators and students have so much to gain when instructional materials are easily accessible and the information inside them is accurate. IMS Global has been a leader in creating easy and secure data exchange standards and ClassLink is pleased to be a contributing member.”

Performance Matters
“This IMS initiative promises to dramatically reduce the cost of integration for school systems and education technology companies like Performance Matters. Simplifying integration will free all ed tech companies to invest more resources in innovations that improve instruction and learning which is what we are all trying to accomplish.” - Woody Dillaha, co-founder and CEO

Samsung
“Samsung is pleased to be an IMS Contributing Member and to lend its support to this open ecosystem to promote better learning outcomes, inspire innovation and reduce costs for school districts. We embrace collaborative ingenuity, and this initiative will integrate the new with the old, and ensure that investments in schools withstand the test of digital changes in the future,” said Ted Brodheim, Vice President of Vertical Business, Samsung Electronics America.

Microsoft
“Microsoft’s commitment to openness and collaboration is ingrained in our day-to-day approach to supporting education institutions and industry partners around the world. Learning has fundamentally transformed the way students and educators create, share and connect. This transformation will be powered by increasingly interconnected tools, content and platforms. Leadership and partnership to ensure we integrate with transparency, respect for student privacy, and a path to new innovation will be critical.” - Anthony Salcito, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector Education

Classworks
“Classworks’ priority is to make our high quality instruction available in as many ways as possible. As part of that, we develop to the IMS Global interoperability standards because it allows our instruction to effectively communicate across all platforms,” says Melissa Sinunu, President of Classworks. “The key is making it inherent in all our development practices, so there are never hidden fees for interoperability and data connections. This includes single-sign on, student rostering; even assigning content and results storing across multiple platforms.”

Carson-Dellosa
Carson-Dellosa Publishing Group is fully supportive of IMS’s leadership and on-the-ground efforts towards an open ecosystem for digital-based learning in K-12.  As evidenced by the use of IMS standards in the training industry for more than a decade and the related savings and benefits accrued by both consumers and organizations, Carson-Dellosa believes that the same type of improvements in innovation, future-proofing of technology investments, and reductions in time and costs for integrating systems, will likewise be enjoyed by K-12 districts. - Steve Griffin, Chief Technology and Digital Officer

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global)

IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology.

Candidate final code and development resources for world’s first educational data analytics interoperability standard created by and for the educational community released to the IMS Global Learning Consortium membership

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Lake Mary, Florida, USA - May 6, 2015 -  IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global / IMS) today announced that the IMS Contributing Member organizations have progressed the breakthrough Caliper Analytics interoperability specification to candidate final release. The goal of Caliper Analytics is to reduce the cost of obtaining quality analytics data from digital educational products by orders of magnitude. As the educational community of institutions and suppliers cooperate on adopting Caliper the data needed to help students succeed and educational institutions improve will become readily available, thus delivering on the promise of digital teaching and learning.

Caliper has progressed through successful alpha and beta specification and software releases, providing code to enable data collection, known as Sensors (or the Sensor API) and data models (known as metric profiles). A developer community web site has been set up for IMS Members while the Caliper v1 work is offered as a candidate final release.

The Caliper workgroup in IMS is led by D2L, Elsevier, Intellify Learning, Learning Objects, McGraw-Hill Education, Penn State University, and the University of Michigan.  Over the last 18 months implementations of the Caliper Sensor API and metric profiles have been tested across a wide range of products and are now operational at scale in several well-known educational products.  Thus, the confidence level in the candidate final release is high.  

A new developer community for IMS Affiliate Members and Contributing Members has been initiated with the following resources: Getting Started Guide, Implementation Guide with sample code, Sensor API code in six programming languages, conformance certification test harness and community technical forums. The developer community will support developers of applications, digital resources, learning platforms and learning event stores, as well as facilitated special interest groups.

IMS Global has also initiated a related activity known as Caliper RAM (Real-time Analytics Messaging). Caliper RAM is a workgroup led by Universities that are applying Caliper to implement real-time, actionable messaging alerts. Caliper RAM is co-chaired by University of Kentucky, University of California Berkeley and University of Texas Austin.

Caliper is sponsored in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, D2L, Gutenberg Technology, Unicon and Vital Source. Contact caliper@imsglobal.org for additional information.

Quotes from supporters of Caliper:

“IMS’ Caliper specification is central to McGraw-Hill Education’s learning analytics product and research strategy. It’s poised now for rapid market adoption and will make a deep impact in industry the same way as LTI has," said Alfred Essa, VP, R&D and Analytics, McGraw-Hill Education.

"Our vision for a next generation digital learning ecosystem encompasses an integrated set of content repositories, learning applications, and analytics capabilities. This first release of Caliper is a significant step toward the realization of that vision, and the University of Michigan is proud to be leading the charge as a member of Team Caliper," said Laura Patterson, CIO and Associate Vice President, University of Michigan.

"The release of IMS Caliper removes a significant barrier to collectively assessing learner activity outside the learning management system (LMS). Penn State and other institutions recognized the need to have a holistic view of learning to enable student success in achieving academic pursuits," said John T. Harwood, Ph.D., Associate Vice Provost for Information Technology, Penn State University.

“Caliper is a fast emerging, education optimized learning data interoperability standard that is key to solving a fast emerging problem with invaluable learning data being silo’ed and inaccessible across an increasing number of learning apps from an increasing number of providers. Caliper helps enable the more holistic and comprehensive analytics based insights needed to enhance the learning, the instruction and the overall effectiveness of the curriculum and its discrete components,” said Chris Vento, IMS Caliper Co-Chair, CEO, Intellify Learning.
“Elsevier will deliver a superior efficacy-based learning experience enabled by the launch of the Caliper Analytics Standard. Our learning solutions will provide targeted educational tools that measure and produce evidence of improved outcomes,” said Mary Millar, Principal Software Engineer, Elsevier.

“D2L is strongly committed to Caliper as a key interoperability standard within the education industry.  As such, we’re proud to be a supporter of Caliper through active contributing membership in the working group and creation of two reference implementations.  We are looking forward to continued involvement, and believe Caliper will play a critical role in support of D2L’s vision of improving the way the world learns,” said Nick Oddson, Senior Vice President, Product Development, D2L.

"The University of Texas is committed to being a leader in an open community of peers contributing to this effort. We are working to bring together higher education leaders and commercial entities to support an open framework for building software that can work across different environments. New tools could help all stakeholders instrument and analyze online learning environments, and potentially intervene to improve them and the learner’s experience in them. Applying an open standard to work in real-time analytics messaging could help nurture the creative potential of innovative design to personalized/adaptive learning tools," saidPhillip D. Long, Ph.D., Associate Vice Provost for Learning Sciences, Deputy Director, Center for Teaching and Learning/Continuing and Innovative Education, The University of Texas at Austin.
"It is incredibly exciting to see the Caliper v 1.0 standard released! Its wide adoption will enable institutions to use learning analytics in a powerful way to impact student outcomes. The real time component we are exploring with Caliper RAM adds an additional dimension that will build on and enrich the Caliper framework," said Jenn Stringer, Associate CIO, Academic Engagement, UC Berkeley.

"Open frameworks for sharing data, like the Caliper Analytics standards, will enable universities to collect critical learning data across an ecosystem of software providers. Through real-time data sharing standards we will be able to provide personalized messaging and support for students in online education and in face-to-face classroom settings while giving our faculty more insight into how well our students are performing. While leading edge today, personalized, real-time learning analytics will become commonplace tomorrow through standards like these,” said Vince Kellen, Senior Vice Provost, Analytics and Technologies, University of Kentucky.

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global)
IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology.

PR Contact:
Sandra DeCastro
Vice President, Community Programs
sdecastro@imsglobal.org

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Organizations and Institutions from Around the World Honored for their Innovative Application of Technology to Achieve Learning Impact

Lake Mary, Florida – 11 May 2015– IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global/IMS), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and impact is pleased to announce the winners of our 9th annual worldwide Learning Impact Awards competition.  This year, eight winners were selected during the final round of competition, out of 16 innovative technology finalists submitted by K-20 institutions and education technology organizations.

The Learning Impact Awards program recognizes the use of technology in context at an educational institution and the results achieved. Winners are selected by a panel of expert evaluators using a series of rubrics to evaluate eight dimensions for improving teaching and learning impact, including improving access, affordability, and quality of learning. The awards were presented during the Learning Impact Leadership Institute which took place May 4-7, 2015 in Atlanta, Georgia. Winners recognized for their outstanding achievement were:

Platinum Medals:

• TAO - Open Source, QTI-Compliant Assessment Platform, OAT - TAO is an Open Source assessment platform that enables test content to be entirely portable, which is crucial as users embrace technology-centric education models. https://youtu.be/K0jq27SQzWw
• Language Learning Space, Education Services Australia - Education Services Australia have customized their Language Learning Space to provide students an exciting world of challenges in an immersive “graphic novel” environment to practice Indonesian and Chinese language skills in context. http://youtu.be/35Fuz9G_GdY

Gold Medals:

• Escambia County School District and Pearson – Escambia County School District selected Pearson’s Schoolnet system in spring 2012 to replace inefficient assessment systems and provide synchronized user access, content, and data across the District to support personalized learning. https://youtu.be/k9W-HSyBkvs
• Present@ at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya - The Present@ platform at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya makes possible the presentation and debate of final degree projects in a virtual learning environment.https://youtu.be/gAaP9jqfciM

Silver Medals:

• Accessible Assessment Items for ELPA21 Consortium – Educational Testing Services (ETS) developed new content authoring tools within an existing item bank, including automated content generation, to develop accessible content structured according to the APIP 1.0 standard within assessment items for the new English Language Proficiency Assessment for the 21st Century (ELPA21). https://youtu.be/gntVuFPnl-8
• Itslearning "HUB" at Houston Independent School District - Houston ISD implemented a digital teaching and learning platform, the “HUB”, to enable the delivery of digital content aligned to standards and assessment of student learning. https://vimeo.com/121933666

Bronze Medals:

• Safari Montage and Orange County Public Schools (OCPS) - As an IMS LTI certified platform, the SAFARI Montage Digital Learning Platform (DCP) allows OCPS teachers to perform a federated search of a wide array of learning materials to support personalized instruction. http://youtu.be/T6dhTEyXqdY
• Makers Empire - Bringing 3D Printing to Primary Schools around the World - The Makers Empire Learning Program provides teachers everything needed to start 3D printing with students as young as age 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crJFtRkCCCo

Medal winners receive a Learning Impact Digital Badge with supporting evidence of achievement from IMS Global and will be recognized in the 2015 Learning Impact Research Report that will be published in late September. 

The following technology projects received Honorable Mention certificates as finalists in this year’s Learning Impact Awards competition:

• ReadSpeaker’s Text to Speech and the Virtual High School - https://youtu.be/NpSggW7SklI
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s U-Pace Program: Greater Academic Success for All -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xksSbq7p36A
• SMART amp at Marietta City Schools is the ‘Glue’ that Connects Classroom Devices - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdY-UcCqPig
• VeriCite Helps LAMP Consortium Identify Plagiarized Text - https://youtu.be/Hh4mSVXERMQ
• DeVry’s Learning Object Infrastructure with EQUELLA, CourseWriter, and Sidebar -https://youtu.be/hdV1fJik5Uo?list=PLysC4Zd9-FmCLrpNW4dP3RhovGRRpPm95
• The University of Michigan and Qualtrics LTI Integration Support Rich Academic Assessment - https://youtu.be/xDmE2YM9_Yo
• The New Jersey Center for Teaching and Learning Progressive Mathematics Initiative® and Progressive Science Initiative® - http://youtu.be/LyVsJ_fz03U
• Texas State Technical College Partners with Hawkes Learning for Co-requisite Success - http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1799374646001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAE2sH_-k~,vce9mL8StXpfr6m6HDn5cLekxP_ErjRA&bctid=4119858042001

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global)
IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology.

Lake Mary, Florida, USA - September 21, 2015– As school districts transition to digital there is growing demand for easier access to a wide variety of digital applications and exchange of data among systems to support personalized learning. To address this demand, IMS Global Learning Consortium, (IMS Global/IMS), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and impact, recently announced the creation of the K-12 Open Tech Ecosystem Initiative with the support of leading suppliers and districts to create an interoperable ecosystem of educational apps, digital resources and learning systems to make it easier for schools to access preferred applications, content and resources without requiring timely and costly custom integrations. To advance progress towards the call for industry wide adoption of open standards, IMS has released two new resources to help Districts accelerate the transition to integrated digital curriculum.

IMS has published a “How to Guide” titled, How to Transition to Integrated Digital Curriculum Using IMS Standards, which provides an overview on how to put IMS standards in place to establish an open architecture to support digital curriculum, tools and use of data to improve student success. The Guide is available for free download at www.imsglobal.org/K12a/K12TransitiontoIntegratedDigCurriculumFNL.pdf.

“Houston ISD started requesting Common Cartridge™ (CC™), Thin Common Cartridge™ (TCC™) and Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI®) integrations from its partners in July of 2014 to make it easier to access and integrate digital curriculum from a wide array of resources. The first TCC took the better part of 6 months. We are proud to say, that this spring, our vendors were able to deliver TCC just two months after we announced which materials we were going to adopt,” said Beatriz Arnillas, Director, IT – Education Technology, Houston ISD. “Today, Houston ISD has TCC and CC from eleven vendors and LTI links from four additional vendors. This adds up to approximately 200 cartridges and more than a million digital learning objects.”

A common barrier districts experience in transitioning to digital is the costly and time consuming process to extract custom CSV data files from the district’s Student Information System (SIS) or other systems to roster a myriad of tools, content and platforms in order to personalize education. To address this barrier to educational innovation, IMS Global has worked with leading districts and suppliers to create a new interoperability standard, called OneRoster™, to simplify the exchange of roster data by eliminating the need for multiple custom formats – and the associated costs. With OneRoster, a district has complete control over the use of its data versus other proprietary solutions in the market that take control away from the district.

OneRoster is being rapidly adopted by leading districts, such as Orange County Public Schools, Brevard Public Schools, and Houston Independent School District. To further accelerate adoption of OneRoster, IMS Global is extending a limited time promotion to help suppliers and districts fast track implementation of OneRoster, obtain IMS Conformance Certification, and help evolve the standard to meet market needs. Details about the OneRoster Conformance certification promotion can be found at www.imsglobal.org/One%20RosterFNL.pdf.

“ClassLink is a leading proponent for open standards, especially IMS standards,” said Berj Akian, CEO of ClassLink. “Through the use of OneRoster and LTI launch link connectors developed by IMS Global, ClassLink delivers one-click account provisioning and single sign-on to McGraw-Hill Education’s content in less than a second. Students and teachers in Brevard use ClassLink to have instant and secure access to all their content.”

“We contractually oblige providers of curriculum, tools and platforms to be certified to the IMS Global OneRoster standard. It significantly simplifies how we exchange student information with a wide range of digital resources, thus eliminating the time-consuming process of creating custom student-data files," said Orange County’s Maurice Draggon, Director of Instructional Management Systems. "As a result, it is easier for us to enable a truly integrated digital teaching and learning experience.”

“As districts transition to digital they need an ecosystem of interoperable digital curriculum, tools, apps and learning platforms that they can rely on to achieve “plug and play” integration in a few simple steps,” said Rob Abel, CEO of IMS Global Learning Consortium. “With the release of OneRoster and the How to Transition to Integrated Digital Curriculum Using IMS Standards, more districts can transition to enabling the next generation digital curriculum that they desire and require.”

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global)
IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology.

Caliper Removes Significant Barriers to Collecting and Analyzing Data to Support Student Success.

Lake Mary, Florida, USA – October 20, 2015 - IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and impact, has announced that nine leading EdTech products have achieved conformance certification to the newly released Caliper Analytics™ standard, the world’s first interoperability standard for educational click stream data.

Caliper Analytics enables the collection of high rate real-time event data, via software sensors (or the Sensor API™) and information models (known as metric profiles). By establishing a set of common labels for learning activity data, the metric profiles enable the exchange of the data across multiple platforms, which will allow institutions to derive better insights from interaction with digital content, learning tools and platforms. In addition to defined metric profiles, Caliper also supports versatile “freeform payloads” in order to support existing products, information model innovation and the diverse needs of analytics researchers. Caliper is a significant milestone as the first analytics data standard created by the education community for the education community.

Several IMS Global Contributing Member organizations have demonstrated leadership and support for Caliper by being among the first to implement Caliper into their products and complete conformance certification.  Those organizations include Blackboard, D2L, Elsevier, Intellify Learning, Kaltura, Learning Objects, McGraw-Hill Education, University of Michigan and VitalSource Technologies.

“The goal of Caliper Analytics is to reduce the cost of obtaining quality analytics data from digital educational products by orders of magnitude,” said Rob Abel, CEO of IMS Global. “Just as the adoption of Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI®) made it radically easier for institutions and faculty to innovate with learning tools and apps, Caliper will revolutionize how institutions holistically assess what is working to move the needle on improving outcomes. We applaud the leadership of the organizations that are the first to adopt and complete conformance certification for Caliper v1.0.  We anticipate that many more organizations will soon follow suit as more and more institutions ask for Caliper conformance to enable consistent access to learner data.”

Caliper Analytics provides more than a specification. Caliper also provides open source code and APIs (the Sensor API™) to enable rapid implementation of the standard. The Caliper v1.0 specification can be downloaded from the IMS Global public website at www.imsglobal.org/specifications.html. Developer resources, including a Getting Started Guide, Implementation Guide with code, and Sensor API code in six programming languages can be found on the IMS Global website at www.imsglobal.org/activity/caliperram.  Caliper Conformance Certification is available to IMS Global members.  A directory of IMS Certified solutions is maintained at www.imscert.org.

"The University of Michigan is proud to have played a leading role in the development of Caliper 1.0, and to be the first institution of higher education to have a service certified as compliant with the specification,” said Laura Patterson, Associate Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Michigan. “Open standards are critical to our vision of an interoperable and loosely coupled digital learning ecosystem.”

Chris Vento, CEO of Intellify Learning, added, "Given that our core business and solution enables learning data management and analytics capabilities across a wide spectrum of learning platforms and apps in HED and K12, we see first-hand in all of our implementations the benefits of Caliper to expedite and enhance data-driven services and integrations.  Our and other's continued adoption and real-world implementations of Caliper will result in optimal continuous improvement and advances in Caliper's capabilities over time.”

"Caliper provides a critical foundation to advance learning analytics; by creating common naming conventions and transport protocols educational institutions and technology providers can provide deeper insights only possible through combining data from multiple platforms,” said Dr. John Whitmer, Platform Analytics and Educational Research Director, Blackboard, Inc.

According to Jon Mott, Chief Learning Officer for Learning Objects, "Consistent access to student learning data across multiple learning tools and environments is critical to personalized, adaptive, and competency-based learning. That is why Learning Objects, Inc. is so committed to Caliper Analytics. We are honored to be among the first vendors to certify under the new specification."

“VitalSource has been at the vanguard of support for IMS and the Caliper standard, and we share a common goal of moving the industry forward with innovative educational analytics,” said Rick Johnson, Vice President of Product and Sales Engineering, VitalSource Technologies Inc. “We are pleased to announce our Caliper certification and we will continue our collaboration with IMS to accelerate the industry’s efforts to measure the efficacy and improve the design of instructional materials.”

“The Caliper Analytics specification is foundational to learning analytics and the mission to improve outcomes for students and educators. Elsevier is excited to be a member of the open data standards community,” said Aaron Zeckoski, Vice President Software Engineering, Elsevier Health Solutions.

Stephen Laster, chief digital officer of McGraw-Hill Education, added, “Targeted learning analytics can provide institutions and instructors with an incredible set of tools to help improve student outcomes. By removing the interoperability barriers to these insights, Caliper Analytics makes it easier for educators to use data to make teaching and learning more personalized and effective. We’re also proud to announce that the latest version of our Reading Wonders program for the K-5 market has achieved Caliper certification.”

“Kaltura is an enthusiastic supporter of IMS, as open sharing of data and content is part of our mission.  We’re therefore very pleased to be an early adopter of the IMS Caliper standard, said Jeff Rubenstein, Vice President Product, Kaltura.  “As we all look to understand more from student learning data —  to better judge the effectiveness of various kinds of content and to personalize student learning — the importance of interoperability and data sharing is greater than ever.  By providing a standard to integrate Kaltura-provided data with the information from other learning systems, Caliper enables us to help partner institutions get even more value from their growing body of video-based content.”

“D2L is a longtime supporter of IMS and we are delighted to be certified for emitting Caliper events." said Nick Oddson, Sr. VP Product Development, D2L. “The Caliper standard is significant as it enables teachers to gather intelligence about student activities from across the entire ecosystem of educational tools, and then leverage that information to improve their student’s success.  As the first LMS platform with the ability to both send and receive rich student data via Caliper, we are thrilled to be working with IMS on the emerging standard.

Caliper is sponsored in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ACE Learning Company, D2L, eLumen, Gutenberg Technology, Unicon and VitalSource Technologies. 

For additional information, contact us at www.imsglobal.org/contactus.cfm.

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global) 
IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology. For more information visit www.imsglobal.org.

Collaboratively-developed white paper provides framework for comprehensive approach to technology adoption and integration

ORLANDO – Nov. 9, 2015 – Today at iNACOL’s Blended and Online Learning Symposium, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE^®) and the IMS Global Learning Consortium released the white paper, A New Paradigm for Decision-Making: A district leaders guide to standard-based technology adoption and integration. With the expanding sea of digital learning solutions, this free resource provides district leaders with a framework for using the IMS Global Interoperability Standards and ISTE Standards to inform a comprehensive and robust digital learning ecosystem. 

The IMS Global Interoperability Standards provide industry guidelines for digital platforms, curriculum, tools and apps that allow for seamless integration and communication with each other. The ISTE Standards provide guidance for the integration of digital courseware and other learning resources within the curriculum. Used together, these standards can help districts define their needs for digital solutions and adopt solutions that support a comprehensive ecosystem for digital learning.

“Our goal is to help schools around the world achieve success in engaging educational technology to empower learning and teaching,” said Brian Lewis, ISTE CEO. “This white paper, developed in collaboration with IMS Global, helps schools avoid the pitfalls encountered in the absence of sufficient planning. It provides a guide for leveraging the IMS Global Interoperability Standards and the ISTE Standards to develop an ecosystem for technology adoption and integration that meets the unique needs of each school system.”

“As districts transition to digital to support personalized learning, they need to know they can trust an ecosystem of interoperable digital tools, apps and learning platforms that are aligned with ISTE standards for technology integration within the curriculum,” said Dr. Rob Abel, CEO, IMS Global Learning Consortium. “The whitepaper outlines an approach to help school leaders address both the pedagogical and implementation requirements of their technology and curriculum investments to enable the next generation digital learning environments they desire.”

The white paper was co-authored by Hap Aziz, connected learning facilitator, and Sandra DeCastro, vice president of community programs, IMS Global; Mindy Frisbee, senior project manager, ISTE; Robert Cole, assistant professor, Department of Educational Studies, St. Louis University; Paula Don, director of educational technology, School District of Philadelphia; Tricia Kennedy, executive director of eCLASS transformation, Gwinnett County Public Schools, Suwanee, Ga.; and Barbara Nesbitt, director of instructional technology, School District of Pickens County, Easley, S.C.

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global) 
IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology. For more information visit www.imsglobal.org. Connect with IMS Global via Twitter and LinkedIn.

About ISTE                                                                             

The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE^®) is the premier nonprofit membership organization serving educators and education leaders committed to empowering connected learners in a connected world. ISTE serves more than 100,000 education stakeholders throughout the world.

Innovative offerings include the ISTE Conference & Expo– the world’s most comprehensive ed tech event – as well as the widely adopted ISTE Standards for learning, teaching and leading in the digital age. The organization’s robust suite of professional learning resources features online courses, consulting services for schools and districts, books, and peer-reviewed journals and publications. For more information, visit iste.org. Connect with ISTE via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. 

For more information, media only:

Lisa Wolfe, L. Wolfe Communications, 773-278-2800, lwolfe@lwolfe.com

###

- Organizations agree to collaborate to lead for broader standards adoption for the K-12 market -

February 9, 2016 – AUSTIN, Texas and LAKE MARY, Florida – Today, the nonprofits Ed-Fi Alliance and IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global) announced their intent to take a unified approach to rostering so that school districts across the U.S. have the ability to allow class lists/rosters and basic student and teacher information to flow easily and securely among data systems and learning technology. This will save teachers and administrators valuable time and make it much easier to use instructional tools in classrooms.

“The widespread adoption of Ed-Fi technology across states and districts in the U.S. indicates that the Ed-Fi Alliance is a great partner to work with to accelerate the adoption of open standards,” said Dr. Rob Abel, Chief Executive Officer of IMS Global. “The marriage of the Ed-Fi Alliance’s focus on harnessing data to equip educators with actionable insights and IMS Global’s focus on teaching and learning technology will enable a breakthrough in enabling interoperability among software and systems of all types.”

IMS Global represents 350 leading education sector organizations, including suppliers, school districts, states, higher education institutions and ministries of education. IMS Global standards include Learning Tools Interoperability® (LTI®), Question and Test Interoperability® (QTI®), Common Cartridge®, OneRoster™ and Caliper Analytics™. Currently, there are more than 380 ed-tech products certified to IMS standards, including more than 70 learning platforms. IMS standards have wide use in both the K-12 and higher education sectors worldwide.

“We believe that leveraging IMS Global standards will play a very important role in the Ed-Fi Community’s work to make data work better for schools,” said Troy Wheeler, President, Ed-Fi Alliance. “The increase in the number of instructional tools and learning content delivery can require a complex, expensive and tedious process to synthesize them in a single data environment. Ed-Fi technology ensures compatibility among current and new systems or products, and the integration of IMS Global standards into the Ed-Fi technology offering will provide seamless connectivity to an ecosystem of hundreds of learning platforms, tools, applications and digital resources.”

Ed-Fi technology is built from the Ed-Fi Data Standard, which is aligned with Common Education Data Standard (CEDS) definitions. The technology’s free license includes this data standard, along with the entire Ed-Fi Implementation Suite, consisting of an operational data store, associated API, and Ed-Fi Dashboards — all of which help educators make sense of and take action against the data they’re collecting. Ed-Fi technology is currently being used by more than 35 states and large districts, impacting more than 10,000 total districts across the U.S. For more information, or to license the Ed-Fi Implementation Suite technology, please visit ed-fi.org/district.

"The Ed-Fi project has been adopted widely by K-12 education agencies. Cooperation across the Ed-Fi Alliance and IMS Global on standards like OneRoster offer tremendous opportunities for saving time and money,” said Kurt Kiefer, CIO for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. “These foundational efforts make innovation feasible within US education system."

In addition to implementing a single, unified approach for rostering, the organizations will work together to produce a joint overview of their standards work, including identifying places where there is low and high overlapping activity. Such a joint overview is intended also to allow agencies currently seeking to implement standards-based technology to move forward with a clearer vision of IMS and Ed-Fi technology work.

"This is a major victory for students of all ages and their families that higher education institutions, K-12 districts, suppliers, foundations and IMS Global are all working together to create teaching and learning data integration standards that hold down costs and create opportunities for innovation,” said Bruce Maas, Vice Provost for IT and CIO at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There are many more such opportunities in our future if the right stars, and right partners, align."

About the Ed-Fi Alliance
Ed-Fi Alliance, LLC, is dedicated to empowering educators with real-time, actionable education data on every student in their classrooms, schools, districts or states. Ed-Fi technology consists of a blueprint for connecting data systems combined with practical tools designed in collaboration with educators and ed-tech professionals in the field. This community continually updates the components and features of the Ed-Fi solution, and the organization actively solicits feedback and input from licensees and education technology leaders to make sure its technology makes a real difference in improving student achievement and teacher satisfaction. The Ed-Fi Alliance is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and is headquartered in Austin, TX.

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) 
IMS GLC is a global, nonprofit, member consortium that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning and educational technology industries through collaborative support of standards, innovation, best practice and recognition of superior learning impact. IMS GLC provides open interoperability specifications, reference models, and adoption practices for learning and educational content and systems. IMS GLC sponsors the annual Learning Impact Leadership Institute and Awards Program. For more information visit www.imsglobal.org.

#6 of a series in preparation for May 2016 Learning Impact Leadership Institute

In the previous posts of this series I have provided a high level overview of the potential goals of next generation learning environments.  In the last several posts I have taken the perspective of what it might mean to be an “interoperable app” in the context of next generation digital learning environments. 

Now it’s time to come back to reality and look for clues from the market in terms of how we are likely to evolve to next generation digital learning environments.

Today is the First Day of Your Journey to NGDLE

One of our conundrums in getting to the next generation is dealing with the current generation.  Educational institutions are already dealing with “sub-optimal” integrations (I’m being kind here) of systems, platforms and applications that teachers and students touch every day.

Indeed, I would be a much less grumpy person, and more importantly, faculty and students would be much more satisfied with technology, if the following products, typically found in a majority of classrooms today, were better integrated:

• Digital textbook (interactive)
• Library digital resources
• Summative testing
• Formative testing
• LMS with Gradebook (or separate Gradebook/outcomes assessment & tracking)
• Classroom capture
• Classroom response
• Classroom management
• Interactive whiteboard
• Other digital resources and applications

This is a pretty limited set.  But if just a subset of these applications were really nicely integrated into a seamless and easy experience for students and faculty, technology would be a lot more appreciated in the education sector. Although in K-12, the “other digital resources and apps” are typically in the hundreds – even today.

The following types of products are also in the mix already.

• Online class conferencing
• Assignment grading system
• Adaptive learning tool(s)
• E-portfolio
• Course evaluation

And don’t forget basic shared IT infrastructure:

• Student information systems
• File storage and sharing
• Video management
• Content authoring
• Calendaring

And then there is the potential for integrating those mobile apps that come to educational institutions courtesy of the Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft consumer Internet app platforms. 

Learning Platforms Are Evolving

Now let’s consider the evolution of the “learning platforms” themselves.  In IMS we use this term rather broadly.  In the future I expect we will be characterizing the subcategories of learning platforms better. But for now a learning platform is essentially an integration point for learning resources that may provide as little functionality as single sign-on and 1-click launch.

News alert!  If you’ve been following IMS recently you will know that there are more than 400 products that have passed conformance certification.  There are over 70 LTI learning platforms and a couple hundred LTI tools in that mix – which probably represent about 1/3 of the actual adoption of the LTI standard in the market.

Indeed in K-12 school districts we are seeing easily 20-50 LTI tools or content series being integrated in districts (1+ million learning objects via thin common cartridge) that have gotten their LTI act together.

One question to ask is, “Are the more sophisticated learning platforms in tune with the stated requirements of the NGDLE?”  Back in October of 2015 I did a featured talk at OLC (Online Learning Consortium) in which I highlighted some of the directions toward NGDLE.  In preparation for that talk I reviewed the web sites of several of the leading learning management systems looking for messaging that might be consistent with the NGDLE requirements.

The figure here shows what I was able to ascertain.  Apologies to all concerned that this is dated now – and therefore may be different today.

While this comparison is a very crude analysis, I do think it reflects several market realities in getting to the NGDLE:

• Analytics (however it might be defined) is clearly the area of the NGDLE that is getting the most attention, interpreted as, “there is strong customer interest and money to be made there.”
• Accessibility as a standalone category is not getting the attention that all of us would hope it would be getting, although personalization (which I have connected to accessibility in this series – see discussion on user preferences here) is getting some play (but I expected more).
• Collaboration gets a fair amount of coverage, but it is not the hot item that the NGDLE research seemed to indicate it should be – perhaps because, as in the world of IMS, collaboration of various types can be supported via a wide range of apps.
• There were a range of other key marketing themes that did not get too much attention in the NGDLE research, including usability, reliability, mobile, content management, course building, grading and competency-based education (CBE).
• Perhaps most interestingly, is that the marketing of the so-called “lynchpin” of the NGDLE, interoperability, was very uneven and, form the perspective of IMS, pretty weak. 

While again, this is a very crude analysis, I think the market is giving us some important messages about NGDLE.  One could take a “glass half empty” of “glass half full” interpretation.  The glass half-empty view is that the product providers are not in tune with those institutional leaders participating in the NGDLE research.  The glass half-full view is that the product companies are focused more on marketing to higher value themes – like product usability, student success, competency-based education, etc.

My own view is that both interpretations are correct. In my thirty-five years of product development experience across a variety of sectors, I feel that there is no sector in which the product providers are more out of touch with their customers than the education sector.  The senior executives and marketing folks in a large number of product companies are not understanding as well as they could the desires of the end users.  On the other hand, I do believe that it will be very specific areas of improvement that will drive progress toward the NGDLE.  General ideas, like personalization, are not going to drive the suppliers and customers to work together to get to the NGDLE.  More specific ideas, like clearly better usability of technology to support teachers and students needs, will.

What Will Drive the Progression Toward NGDLEs?

Getting to next generation digital learning environments will happen because the high-value use cases require cooperation among a diverse set of digital resources, apps, tools and platforms.  Enabling specific high-value use cases is key. Where the “architecture” comes in is to be able to evolve the solutions to those use cases collaboratively across an ecosystem of suppliers and institutions – versus a much more slow and ultimately unreliable approach of big bets on one-vendor solutions.

To put it another way, the evolution to NGDLE will be driven by a combination of high value use cases enabled by an interoperable product ecosystem.

Up next in the series: In the next and final post of this series on next generation digital learning environments I will take my guess at specific use-cases and new product categories that are driving us toward NGDLEs.

Content-Item Message 1.0 and Membership Service 1.0 are recommended upgrades to enable deeper integration of LTI enabled products

Lake Mary, Florida, USA - May 24, 2016 - IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and innovation today announced final release of two specifications that leverage the widely adopted Learning Tools Interoperability^® (LTI^®). LTI Content-Item Message 1.0 and Membership Service 1.0 enable features that make integration of learning tools with learning platforms more seamless than LTI on its own. IMS Global is recommending adoption of both of these new specifications by all providers of LTI-enabled products.

LTI Content-Item Message 1.0 extends the LTI toolbox by adding a new message type to streamline the process of setting up an LTI tool link. This new message type enables external (LTI) tools to appear in the same way that internal tools do. Using Content-Item Message will eliminate a prime reason for custom integrations.

Membership Service 1.0 is an LTI specification enabling instructors to automate the provision of student lists via LTI to an external tool. LTI does not pass user information in its default configuration. Using Membership Service user information can be passed in a safe and secure manner. The Membership feature also allows instructors to be given a display showing the activity of all their students. 

“These two specifications build off the success of LTI to further enhance the user experience for students when navigating among instructional applications and significantly streamlines workflows for instructors,” says Mark Leuba, Vice President of Product Management of IMS Global. “The release of these specifications move us closer to achieving seamless interoperability to enable teaching and learning innovation.”

Developer implementation guides, GitHub API Code Libraries, and conformance testing harnesses, as well as procurement and administrator guides for institutions, have been initiated.
 

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global)
IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology.

IMS Global, Mozilla Foundation, and LRNG Announce Next Steps to Accelerate the Evolution and Adoption of the Open Badges Standard

Mozilla Foundation and Collective Shift/LRNG to Transition Management of the Popular Open Badges Project to IMS Global to Ensure Long-term Support and Sustainability

LAKE MARY, Florida, 28 October 2016 – IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global/IMS), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and innovation, the Mozilla Foundation, and Collective Shift/LRNG announced today an agreement for IMS Global to become the organization responsible for advancing the development, transferability, and market adoption of the Open Badges specification beginning January 1, 2017. As an open-governance, member-based standards consortium, IMS Global is committed to furthering the adoption, integration, and portability of digital badges to meet the needs of learners, educators, and employers.

“IMS is the smart choice for the next step in the evolution of the Open Badges initiative,” said Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, who serves on the Badge Alliance Steering Committee along with Dr. Rob Abel, CEO of IMS Global, and Connie Yowell, CEO of Collective Shift/LRNG. “The IMS community shares the values of openness and collaboration that have driven this project since its launch in 2011.” Both the Mozilla Foundation and LRNG will become IMS Contributing Members to help lead and support the evolution of the Open Badges standard.

“I look forward to working with the IMS member community to build on the momentum gained by Mozilla and Open Badges contributors, as well as address some of the challenges identified, such as articulating the value of digital credentials,” said Connie Yowell. “IMS is bringing together the wide range of stakeholders dedicated to working together to accelerate progress.” Open Badges started as a Mozilla-led project funded by the MacArthur Foundation that included the creation of the Badge Alliance community to help organize adoption. The work of the Open Badges community will continue via IMS Global, facilitated by a revamped website featuring both technical evolution and badge adoption community activities.

“The IMS community is a very good fit for this effort because of our leadership in the education technology market, our collaborative K-20 and EdTech supplier member network, and our existing investments in enabling better digital credentialing, specifically our focus on Open Badges extensions for education, the extended transcript, and competency-based education,” commented Dr. Rob Abel. “Working closely with Mozilla Foundation and LRNG over the last year has confirmed that this move should help to accelerate development of the open badges product ecosystem.”

IMS is inviting Open Badges contributors, who have invested their time and talent in this movement, to join a new Open Badges Community Council. The Community Council will be a channel to showcase thought leadership around Open Badges and provide guidance to IMS activities. IMS will also be forming an executive leadership council for IMS member organizations that are actively contributing to market development and adoption. During the transition, the Open Badges community is actively working towards the release of Open Badges 2.0, the most significant upgrade to the specification since its release, which will make it possible to address dozens of high priority use cases identified by key stakeholders.

Comments from Leading Open Badges Ecosystem Organizations

City & Guilds

“By adopting the Open Badges standard and combining it with our expertise in accreditation and assessment, we can help even more people validate their skills and competencies,” said Chris Jones, chief executive, City & Guilds Group. “Open standards will be essential in creating a global and interoperable ecosystem that will allow us to be part of something truly game-changing. We are delighted that IMS will be driving the standard forwards and believe this will help deliver a step change in delivering global adoption. Through Digitalme, City & Guilds Group’s role will focus on high-quality, relevant and trusted credentials which make the biggest difference in individual’s life and career.”

Concentric Sky

"I believe the Open Badges standard has the power to help catalyze significant advancements in education technology,” said Wayne Skipper, CEO of Concentric Sky and head of the open source project Badgr. “IMS Global’s focus on interoperability makes it the perfect home for the standard and I’m excited to continue our work together with IMS to build a robust ecosystem for portable digital credentials.”

Credly

"In the marketplace for knowledge and skills, digital credentials are emerging as the currency of choice. A crucial input to the development of any currency is the adoption of standards across industries and applications," said Jonathan Finkelstein, founder and CEO of Credly. "As early advocates of credential and badge standards, Credly is pleased to see the Open Badges specification find a new home, and to build on contributions to the ecosystem with partners like IMS Global, LRNG, and Mozilla."

D2L

“Badging and digital credentialing is an important part of building the future of learning and assessment, and the evolving world of capturing skills, achievement, and experience,” said Jeremy Auger, chief strategy officer, D2L Corporation. “IMS Global is the perfect choice for the ongoing stewardship of Open Badges, bringing a world-class collaborative approach to drive buy-in, adoption, and success for the standards under their care.”

EDUCAUSE

“This is a most welcome development,” said Malcolm Brown, director, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. “IMS Global has been experiencing increasing success and exercising conspicuous leadership in the development and adoption of open standards for education. Badging will continue to gain in importance in educational contexts as we pursue new options for recognizing educational achievement. So it comes as terrific news that IMS will be carrying forward the important work initiated by Mozilla with respect to the Open Badges specification.”

IBM

"I see Open Badges as an increasingly valuable tool to recognize demonstrated knowledge and skills in the 21st century,” said David Leaser, senior manager for the IBM Open Badge Program. “IMS Global is a trusted partner in this new ecosystem, and this transition ensures the long term success of Open Badges. Badge issuers, earners, and employers will benefit tremendously from this move.”

Pearson

“Pearson Acclaim has been an active participant in the Open Badges community since 2011, pledging support for the standard as founding members of the Badge Alliance when it launched in 2014,” said Jarin Schmidt, director, Acclaim Services, Pearson. “The Acclaim platform is Open Badges compliant and we continue to advocate for open, verified, learner-controlled credentials as we work with the world's leading learning organizations to grow the use of Open Badges. We are excited to support IMS Global as it ushers in a new era of leadership for the community and we look forward to further collaboration to enhance the technical specifications to advance the Open Badges ecosystem.”

For more information see the Open Badges Transition FAQ.

About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global)

IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology to affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas to help shape the future of educational technology.

About Mozilla Foundation

The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation believes the internet must always remain a global public resource that is open and accessible to all. Our work is guided by the Mozilla Manifesto. The direct work of the Mozilla Foundation focuses on making the health of the internet a mainstream issue. We do this by connecting open internet leaders with each other and by mobilizing grassroots activities around the world. The Foundation is also the sole shareholder in the Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox and other open source tools. Mozilla Corporation functions as a self-sustaining social enterprise – money earned through its products is reinvested into the organization.

About Collective Shift/LRNG

Collective Shift is a nonprofit dedicated to redesigning social systems for the connected age. Building on over a decade of research, Collective Shift launched LRNG initiative in 2015 to close the equity gap by transforming how young people access and experience learning and the available paths to success. Using an online platform as an infrastructure, LRNG is building an ecosystem of learning that combines in-school, out-of-school, employer-based and online learning experiences into a seamless network that is open to all youth. LRNG is designed to help youth to identify emerging passion areas, engage in online or local experiences related to their interests, produce and share work, and develop marketable skills. When young people successfully complete learning experiences called playlists, they earn digital badges.

Report Features Advancements in Digital Content Adoption, Adaptive Learning, Next Generation Learning Platforms and Learning Analytics

LAKE MARY, Florida, 15 November 2016– IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and innovation, announced the availability of the 2016 Learning Impact Report. The annual Learning Impact Awards, a global competition created in 2007 by IMS Global for the purpose of recognizing outstanding, innovative applications of educational technology to address the most significant challenges facing education, and subsequent report are designed to help the education community assess the landscape of technology innovations and potential for learning impact.

At the core of the report is the IMS Global Learning Impact Trend Framework, a leading indicator of emerging education technology trends that offers planning guidance for education institutions. Each technology project in the competition aligns with at least one framework category as identified in the report. In addition, the report provides an analysis of the Learning Impact Award medalists and honorable mentions and highlights several pragmatic solution themes.

The 2016 report recognizes the increasing shift toward digital curriculum and associated tools that enable teachers to easily and dynamically customize content delivery to support learner needs. Platinum medal winner Florida Virtual School created unLOck to open access to tens of thousands of online FLVS K-12 standards-aligned lessons in a way that districts and teachers can adapt content to specific curriculum and student learning needs. Santillana USA, a silver medalist, created Español Santillana, an e-learning resource that enables teachers to customize their class experience within an easy to use single environment. And opting for a cloud-based solution that delivers standards-based content for students to use in a variety of learning situations, bronze medal recipient, QuaverMusic.com/Paradise Valley Unified School District illustrates a way for teachers to customize their lessons to respond to specific learner needs.

Addressing learner needs in a classroom situation can be a challenging proposition, especially when knowledge levels vary significantly. While “self-contained” adaptive learning software continues to grow, the use of third-party formative assessment addresses this issue by sequencing each learner’s course content based upon performance information. Gold medalist McGraw Hill Education/Lone Star College - North Harris offers an example demonstrating improved learner performance by creating self-paced, mastery-based learning environments with adaptive learning and assessment. Universitat Oberta de Cataluna introduced a Mobile App Ecosystem that works across different classrooms and subjects allowing students and teachers to perform their continuous assessment related tasks from any mobile device. University of Texas at Austin - Learning Sciences Department and D2L's Brightspace LeaP created Pharmacy Adaptive Learning, an adaptive learning engine that assesses students’ knowledge and gears them to appropriate content.

Other 2016 finalists demonstrate how learning analytics can be used to understand student behavior and evaluate resource effectiveness.  KERIS, University of Seoul, and Intercode aims to tackle the problem of learning analytics interoperability through independent Lego-like blocks of processes. LearnMeter and Northern Beaches Secondary College’s SchoolViewer provides a “bottom up” refinement of teaching, where teachers access real time class learning analytics, such as student engagement, attention span, distractibility, and resource use. Echo360 and University of Kentucky created an integrated teaching and learning platform over an analytic backbone measuring behaviors and enabling the optimization of teaching and learning experiences.

Additional entries demonstrate that K-12 continues to intensely pursue personalized learning. With Kennisnet's Personalized Learning Lab, students conduct a self-assessment of their learning progress. Maryland’s Montgomery Public Schools implemented McGraw Hill Education's Engrade is a learning management and assessment solution that provides a real-time view of student achievement, helping instructors to make informed decisions about the effectiveness of curriculum and assessment strategies. Learning.com and North East Florida Educational Consortium implemented a web-based solution that provides school districts with curriculum building tools to access, organize, and share digital curriculum resources with the entire district or select campuses. SAFARI Montage and Newton Public Schools created a best-in-breed, standards-based learning platform.

Another notable observation is that we are now experiencing a new generation of platforms that integrate applications at the institutional level. Silver medal winner Classlink/Jeff Davis County Schools demonstrates the time and cost benefits derived from the integration of institution-wide apps into the learning infrastructure. Deakin University developed DeakinSync, a personalized digital learning hub, provides 15,000 Deakin off-campus students convenient and seamless access to all university services and content whenever they need them.

Education technology continues to evolve traditional delivery models, supporting effective combinations of online, classroom, and in-context learning. Platinum medalist Western Sydney University, School of Nursing and Midwifery implemented the largest blended learning program and iPad rollout by an Australian university, involving seven campuses and serving 45,000 students and staff, which resulted in increased student accessibility. Gold medalist Career Education Corporation developed a single digital learning platform to address the need to integrate with third-party tools to provide an intuitive and personalized learning environment. DET Victoria, a bronze medalist, teamed up with schools in South Korea, Japan, and China to create Global LYNCs, a project that provides global learning experiences via telecommunications and virtual learning that helps students gain skills that will help them in a 21st century workplace. Other notable entries illustrating new student learning experiences include: SkillsCommons and Colorado Community College System, SuiteC - UC Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin - Learning Sciences Department, WeDu communications Co., Ltd, College voor Toetsen en Examens, National Institute for Digital Learning, Dublin City University, and Learning Objects and University of Maryland University College (UMUC).

“The future of education technology is clearly demonstrated by the innovative ideas coming out of the Learning Impact Awards program,” said Dr. Rob Abel, CEO of IMS Global. “The nominations we receive have high value impact because they are ahead of the mainstream adoption of educational technology trends thereby offering inspiration and direction for future education technology planning.”

The submission period for the 2017 Learning Impact Awards will begin in early January 2017. Award winners will be recognized at the annual IMS Global Learning Impact Leadership Institute.

About IMS Global Learning Consortium
IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology to affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas to help shape the future of educational technology.

IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces Plenary Speakers for 2017 Learning Impact Leadership Institute

Visionary Leadership at Signature Global Event Affirms Movement in EdTech Toward Plug and Play Ecosystem

LAKE MARY, Florida, 12 April 2017 – IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and innovation, announced the lineup of industry leaders who will speak to a global audience of education technology and academic leaders at the annual Learning Impact Leadership Institute. The plenary sessions will be delivered, as a series of dynamic 15-minute lightning talks focused on Creating the Future EdTech Ecosystem Together, by industry leaders who are championing the growth of the plug and play ecosystem to support innovation.

Plenary speakers include:

• Tim Beekman, president and co-founder, SAFARI Montage
• Ken Brooks, chief operating officer, Macmillan Learning
• Keith Krueger, chief executive officer, CoSN
• Stephen Laster, chief digital officer, McGraw-Hill Education
• Melissa Loble, vice president, platform and partnerships, Instructure
• Phillip Long, chief innovation officer Project 2021, The University of Texas at Austin
• Leah Lommel, assistant vice president and chief operating officer, EdPlus at ASU
• Jonathan Mott, chief learning officer, Learning Objects
• Marc Nelson, vice president, platform product management and marketing, Pearson
• Serena Sacks, chief information officer, Fulton County Schools
• Anthony Salcito, vice president of education, Microsoft
• Lenny Schad, chief technology information officer, Houston Independent School District
• Jennifer Vogel-Walcutt, director of innovation, ADL Initiative

Closing response panelists include:

• Jason Palmer, general partner, New Markets Venture Partners
• Deborah Quazzo, co-founder and managing partner, GSV Acceleration
• James Wiley, principal analyst, Eduventures
• Troy Williams, managing director, University Ventures

In addition to the plenary sessions, there are eight parallel tracks in which industry leaders will reveal the latest innovations and practices in achieving digital transformation:

• Digital curriculum advances to enable faculty innovation and student-centered learning
• Strategic and near-term IT foundations to encourage academic innovation
• K-12 digital learning ecosystem revolution: changing the lives of teachers and students
• Accessibility advances: industry leaders cooperating on content, tools, platforms
• e-Assessment at the leading edge: advanced items, adaptive testing, large scale real-time processing
• Learning insights: learning data and analytics to inform student success
• Next-generation environment now: the latest developments in the IMS Global plug and play ecosystem of platforms, apps, and tools
• Reinventing the transcript: digital credentials, Open Badges, and competency-based education programs

“The Learning Impact Leadership Institute was created to help develop the leadership and ideas that will help shape the future of educational technology,” said Dr. Rob Abel, CEO of IMS Global Learning Consortium. “This year’s program features an impressive roster of presenters and the key topics that institutions need to be on top of to enable their digital strategies.”

The Learning Impact Leadership Institute is the premier event for senior curriculum, academic, and IT leaders who are engaged in driving educational technology forward to meet the demands for making learning more personalized, affordable, and accessible for all. It will be held in Denver, Colorado, May 16-19, 2017.

Statements of Support for the Learning Impact Leadership Institute

To learn more the Learning Impact Leadership Institute and to register, visitwww.imsglobal.org/lili2017. To see how the future of edtech starts here view the videos from the 2016 lightning talk series.

IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology to affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS Global members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS Global sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas to help shape the future of educational technology. Visit imsglobal.org and follow @LearningImpact.

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IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces Finalists and Opens Public Voting for the 2017 Learning Impact Awards

Institutions and Organizations from Around the World Recognized for Their Innovative Application of Education Technology to Improve Learning Impact

LAKE MARY, Florida, 14 April 2017 – IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global), the world leader in edtech interoperability and innovation, announced today the selection of 38 finalists advancing to the final round of competition for the 2017 Learning Impact Awards. The finalists were selected from all entries received through the open call for nominations and from regional competitions held around the world.

IMS Global’s annual Learning Impact Awards recognize outstanding applications of educational technology that address the most significant challenges facing education. The focus on institutional impact distinguishes this awards program from others. The solutions offered by the finalists demonstrate the potential for improving the impact on learning and serve to inspire educational leaders to innovate in their regions and institutions.

All selected nominees advance to the final round of competition at the 2017 Learning Impact Leadership Institute in Denver, Colorado, May 16-19. A panel of evaluators review and judge the finalists’ entries, which consist of a short video pitch, detailed project flyer, and a brief Q&A session, using eight criteria for determining the learning impact in an educational setting. From the 38 finalists, eight medal winners will be selected and announced during the awards luncheon on May 18.

In addition to the expert panel of evaluators, for the second year, the edtech community at large will be able to review and rate the finalists’ projects for their learning impact potential. Access to the finalists’ videos and one-page overviews is now available. Public voting will close at noon MT on May 17.

“The Learning Impact Awards competition uncovers innovative and effective implementations of technology that are setting the future direction of the edtech ecosystem,” said Dr. Rob Abel, CEO of IMS Global Learning Consortium. “This year’s finalists are the best ever and we thank the K-12 and higher education institutions that have stepped forward to contribute to this transformational body of work that is added to each year via our annual Learning Impact Research Report.”

IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology to affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS Global members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS Global sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas to help shape the future of educational technology.

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IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces Release of OneRoster v1.1 

Upgrade to Popular Standard Offers School Systems and Districts New Services for Formative and Summative Scores and Course Materials

LAKE MARY, Florida, 27 April 2017 — IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global), the world leader in edtech interoperability and innovation, announced today the availability of OneRoster^® v1.1, an upgrade that allows school districts and educators to more easily collect assessment results across digital curriculum products, associate students with digital course materials, and synchronize gradebooks across district systems. The upgrade is immediately available for implementation and certification testing.

The IMS Global OneRoster and Learning Tools Interoperability^® (LTI^®) standards have revolutionized workflow in the digital classroom. IMS Global developed OneRoster to alleviate the costly and time-consuming manual effort involved in updating student records and exchanging roster information. Extending the function of OneRoster v1.0, which automates rostering across multiple curriculum products, the latest OneRoster v1.1 standard adds services that transmit assessment results to the student information system and creates associations with digital course materials from a class or a course.

Education technology vendors and publishers that have achieved early conformance certification for OneRoster v1.1 include ClassLink, Classworks, McGraw-Hill Education, NetRef, Pearson Education, and Studies Weekly.

IMS Global conformance certification ensures the performance and validity of the OneRoster specification for districts planning to adopt it. “OneRoster v1.1 is a major breakthrough for those school districts and product developers that have found it challenging to get ‘data back’ from curriculum products and synchronize that data with the learning platform or student system,” said Dr. Rob Abel, chief executive officer, IMS Global Learning Consortium. “While the sophistication of the data will surely improve over time, OneRoster v1.1 will address many of the current challenges that frustrate faculty and IT.”

To further the adoption of OneRoster, IMS Global established a product steering committee, coordinated by IMS Global vice president of product management, Mark Leuba, which serves in an advisory role to inform and support the technical work by the IMS Global community. IMS Global Contributing Member organizations that form the OneRoster Product Steering Committee include ClassLink, Infinite Campus, Itslearning, Kimono, McGraw-Hill Education, Microsoft, Pearson Education, Performance Matters, Schoology, and Unicon.

To download the OneRoster v1.1 specification and related documents, go to imsglobal.org/activity/onerosterlis.

Statements on OneRoster from Leading EdTech Organizations

IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology to affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS Global members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS Global sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas to help shape the future of educational technology.

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IMS Global Learning Consortium Achieves Record Levels of Growth for 11th Straight Year

2016 Annual Report Highlights Continued Growth in Membership and Revenue for the World’s Largest Educational Technology Collaboration

LAKE MARY, Florida, 3 May 2017 — IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global), the world leader in edtech interoperability and innovation, announced today the release of its annual report for the calendar year 2016. The report is available online at www.imsglobal.org/2016annualreport.

In 2016, IMS Global showed significant and continued growth in membership, revenue, and conformance certifications achieved, signaling expanded reach and market demand for open standards to enable a trusted plug-and-play ecosystem. Total membership reached its highest level, adding 53 net new members from higher education institutions, K-12 school districts, public education ministries, and edtech product suppliers around the globe. Over the last 11 years, membership has climbed at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.6%. Revenue surpassed four million dollars for the first time; increasing at a CAGR of 12.8% over this same 11-year period. IMS Global expanded its presence on the global stage with the formation of two new chapters, IMS Europe and the IMS Japan Society.

The rate and demand for IMS Global conformance certifications—the only means to guarantee interoperability across the widest range of product integrations—have grown steadily. Throughout the year, there were 24 OneRoster^® certifications, making OneRoster the fastest adopted IMS Global standard, while Learning Tools Interoperability^® (LTI^®) continued to expand across the education sector, with 144 products certified in 2016 alone.

“IMS Global evolves and adapts to face the ongoing challenge to improve teaching and learning technology,” said Dr. Rob Abel, chief executive officer, IMS Global Learning Consortium. “As demonstrated by the 2016 results, IMS Global members are making great progress toward an edtech ecosystem that is a better way to the future of education than any of the known alternatives in terms of providing great user experiences, lowering the barriers to innovation, enabling actionable information, and saving on integration time and cost.”

IMS Global heralded a new phase of leadership in digital credentials by assuming the management and stewardship of the Open Badges standard on January 1, 2017. In addition, IMS Global completed a pilot of the Extended Transcript standard designed to consolidate multiple forms of learner achievements into a flexible, but standardized credential records store.

IMS Global community leadership launched nine institutional Innovation Leadership Networks to develop resources and share strategies that make it easier for institutions to transition to an integrated teaching and learning ecosystem. These resources are available to the public via the  Higher Education and K-12 Playbooks. 2016 was also a year for advancing and strengthening five key initiatives established to lead and scale the evolution of effective digital learning environments.

To support learning data and analytics, the Caliper Analytics^® Workgroup began incorporating feedback from initial market implementations—including the 19 learning platforms, tools, and publisher products that achieved Caliper v1.0 certification—to substantially enhance the education analytics standard with an extended information model and improved efficiency.

IMS Global standards are making high-quality interoperable digital assessment easier for states, state consortia, and edtech suppliers around the world. In 2016, the e-Assessment technical workgroups finalized and published a profile of Accessible Portable Item Protocol^® (APIP^®) for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers (PARCC) community. And work began on the next version of Question and Test Interoperability^® (QTI^®) that combines the accessibility functionality of APIP with more advanced features for rendering control and results reporting.

Enabling an innovative ecosystem of learning platforms, apps, and tools, the latest version of the LTI standard includes support for privacy and student data use declarations, automated tool re-registration, and updated security and authentication. LTI can be expanded with a library of extensions performing specific data sharing functions, such as the new Gradebook Services extension, which provides enhanced means for assignments in a learning platform’s gradebook to be graded with an assessment tool, and have grade results returned to the platform’s gradebook along with any comments from the assessor.

The most recent IMS Global achievements and results will be announced at the 2017 Learning Impact Leadership Institute, May 16-19, in Denver, Colorado.

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