K-12 and Higher Ed Institutions Lead Consortium to Advance EdTech Innovation and Trust

Does your school district or higher ed institution use a learning management system (LMS), digital curriculum resources, learning tools, assessment applications, a badging platform, a single-sign-on application launcher or a student information system? Then your institution has benefited from a quiet but powerful 20-year revolution of connecting edtech ecosystems.

Previously, it would take months of time and tens of thousands of dollars to connect these common edtech components, ensure they are rostered with the right sets of users and display the student progress and assessment information properly. Now, this integration can take just a few minutes. That results in massive time and cost savings. Most importantly, the user experience and instruction time are now the primary focus rather than how to connect products.

How did this advancement happen? Several hundred districts, higher ed institutions, state agencies and supplier and end-user organizations came together through a non-profit collaboration known today as the 1EdTech Consortium. In 2006 the consortium featured 50 member organizations. Today, nearly 900 organizations participate from 28 countries.

Shaping EdTech Strategy and Connectivity

Today, there are over 8000 edtech products that the 1EdTech community certified as meeting 1EdTech standards for quality and trust. 1EdTech’s technical interoperability standards, such as Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), Common Cartridge, OneRoster, Question and Test Interoperability (QTI), Caliper Analytics, Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE), Open Badges and Comprehensive Learner Record, have become nearly ubiquitous in edtech.

The best way to partake in this revolution is by being part of the 1EdTech movement called TrustEd Apps. School districts and higher education institutions leading the future in making their tech ecosystem work for the needs of faculty and students see the 1EdTech collaboration as a core part of their transformation strategy. Active participation operationalizes establishing an open, trusted and innovative ecosystem while fostering better edtech for all.

Members Make the Difference

1EdTech is a global leading organization, roughly equivalent today to the well-known World Wide Web Consortium in size, and its growth is accelerating. But how 1EdTech got to this size may surprise you. Yes, 1EdTech is known for world-class technical work, but the secret sauce has been in the leadership, partnership and collaboration among the members. While members of each type have their own workspaces to discuss priorities, the members of all types come together to share and build trust through common goals that improve the lives of faculty and learners. It is from this leadership that such growth and gains have been reached. The 1EdTech community is working daily to develop the leveraging connectivity that will make a difference for decades to come.

Today, the 1EdTech community is focused on enabling four key strategies that will have a major impact now and in the future.

1. Ensuring that every institution, regardless of size and resources, has a digital ecosystem that is trusted and responsive by leveraging the latest advances in standards-based student data privacy and connectivity.
2. Ensuring that a wide range of strategies for personalized, student-centered learning and pathways can be achieved by enabling a choice of digital learning products that can be configured for the needs of each student.
3. Creating a sea change in how institutions recognize achievement that enables learners to do a much better job “telling the story of their learning journey” and connecting them to better opportunities.
4. Dramatically reducing the cost associated with enabling a “data rich” edtech ecosystem and thus helping learners, faculty and administrators achieve access to data and analysis in time to improve learner success.

Join Academic and Technology Leaders

Our community thrives by getting together, and we conduct some 500 workgroup meetings a year. But the best place to collaborate is (thankfully, now, post-COVID) in-person at our Learning Impact annual event held June 5-8 in Anaheim, California. You don’t have to be a member to attend. This year we will get to the bottom of the impact of AI in education, the state of personalized learning, best practices in adopting digital micro-credentials, where we are really in terms of getting data to the right person at the right time and more.