Educational technology (EdTech) has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning— we’ve already seen many of the benefits as schools adopt more digital tools. But there are also challenges to widespread adoption, such as high costs, being tied into using bloated systems, the need for teacher training, and ensuring accessibility for all students.
Open standards are specifications for educational technology that ensure tools work together, including easy and safe data transfer, so you can mix and match the options that make sense for your school. Easier to learn and more accessible, tools that meet open standards can help you exploit the power of tech without the headaches.
Read on to find out more about open standards and how they can help you make the most of EdTech.
Key Takeaways
- Challenges in introducing EdTech to schools include data protection, training needs, and the cost of upgrading tools.
- These can be addressed through open standards—specifications for technology that mean different tools and products are more consistent and work well together.
- In EdTech, they make it easier to transfer learning materials and student data across tools, lower the cost of building and scaling a tech suite, and ensure greater accessibility for SEND students.
How Do Open Standards Apply to the Education Sector?
Open standards are specifications for educational technology defined by the 1Edtech Global Learning Consortium that ensure different tools and products work together seamlessly and provide a consistent user experience.
Open standards are increasingly important in education as schools and other institutions adopt technology for everyday use. EdTech now comes in a wide range of formats to address diverse issues ranging from student registration to assessment and data analysis. Without tools that combine easily, teachers and students would have to manage separate logins, manual data transfers (such as grades or attendance figures), and complicated and incompatible interfaces.
Key examples of open standards in EdTech include
- QTI (Question & Test Interoperability): A standard for creating, delivering, and exchanging assessments and test items across platforms seamlessly.
- LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability): Facilitates the integration of external tools and resources into learning management systems (LMS), enabling a connected learning experience.
- OneRoster: A standard for securely sharing class rosters, enrollment data, and grades between systems.
- CASE (Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange): Ensures consistent management and sharing of learning standards and competency frameworks.
- Open Badges: A form of digital credentialing that recognizes and verifies skills, achievements, and learning outcomes.
- SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), which allows teachers to create and share resources across learning management systems.
Benefits of Open Standards in EdTech
1Edtech open standards bring a range of useful benefits to EdTech, including the following:
Interoperability
When tools, platforms, and resources fit together seamlessly, integrating EdTech into your school becomes easier and more efficient. Let’s take homework as an example. With interconnected systems, you can assign your students a task to complete with one digital tool, sync the results to your LMS, and then analyze the results using data analysis software. This common task becomes easier, reducing your workload, but also providing valuable information that you can use to tweak your next lessons.
Online assessment is another area where interoperability becomes crucial. The QTI standard lets you freely move assessment content and data between platforms, making it easy to transfer your tests if you want to change your software or plug in resources from other providers. Where proprietary frameworks often lock your content away, making it difficult or even impossible to move with you, a system that leverages the QTI standard ensures you have 100% ownership over your assets.
TAO is the first product to get QTI certification in 4 areas (Authoring and Editing systems, Delivery systems, Item and Test bank systems, and QTI content).
Easier collaboration
Because resources and tools made with open standards in mind work across platforms and systems, it’s easier for educators and leaders to collaborate within and across institutions. For example, teachers in a school district could share lesson materials made with SCORM, which others can access regardless of which LMS they use.
Flexible scaling
With interoperable tools, you can build out your own ideal EdTech suite without being locked into one provider. This means you can choose the solutions that work best for your school, and add more as different needs arise, or new technology emerges, without needing to set up a whole new system.
Ease of data transfer
Gathering and analyzing data used to be a daunting manual task for educators. Gone are the days of painstakingly entering student grades into individual spreadsheets—with EdTech, you can collect large volumes of detailed data from digital tasks and assessments in moments.
Open standards mean that data files you export from a program are compatible with analysis software, so you can create charts, dashboards, or reports at the click of a button. This can help you take action more quickly, so assessment results can make a real impact in the classroom.
Cost efficiency
Open standards can save your institution money by giving you full freedom to select the tools you need from across the market at a more competitive price. You can also easily reuse materials and resources even when you update your software, rather than purchasing new versions or wasting valuable staff time in recreating them.
Accessibility
Where tools make accessibility commitments, you know they can meet the needs of all learners, including those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) ensure tools and resources are created with 4 key accessibility principles in mind:
- Content must be perceivable by at least 1 sense for all users (so design must take blind and deaf users into account, for example);
- The user interface must be operable regardless of disability.
- Content should be understandable.
- Content should be “robust,” meaning it can be interpreted by other tech, including assistive tools.
Through supporting the implementation of WCAG, open standards can make your classroom more equitable and inclusive for all learners.
Challenges in Edtech
While EdTech is having a positive impact across the education sector, there are several challenges that schools and educators still face in deploying it to full effect. For example:
The digital divide
A key concern for the expansion of EdTech is the persistence of a digital divide. Many students still lack access to high-speed internet and appropriate devices to use it, even within developed countries like the United States. Without adequate connections to use tech at home, students may be disadvantaged.
Data privacy concerns
With EdTech, schools can collect a huge amount of granular data on each student. To safeguard student privacy, schools need to protect themselves against data breaches. They also need to take data laws into account, such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
Teacher training
Introducing new technology always requires some kind of training, and EdTech is no exception. Teachers need to feel comfortable and confident in using digital tools and troubleshooting problems that may arise. Not only can a lack of training mean they don’t use the tools to their full effect, but it can also impede their uptake across a school. This could mean the return on investment is less and the student experience isn’t consistent.
The need to replace tools
You might need to replace or upgrade your digital tools over time, as the curriculum changes or tech developments introduce new features. This can become expensive.
How Open Standards Can Help
Thankfully, the 1Edtech standards can help address these concerns. Through interoperability, it’s easy to customize your tech suite—when it’s time to upgrade, you simply can plug in new or replacement software piece by piece over time. This can be much cheaper than upgrading a whole system.
Open standards also make it easier for tech products to meet data privacy requirements. They establish guidelines for data transfer that make it easier to keep information encrypted and safe, rather than spreading it across several online and offline locations. Assessment products like TAO, which make use of interoperability to ensure data privacy, are a good example of this.
When it comes to teacher training, the increased ease and efficiency of open standards tools make them less intimidating, and the more consistent user experience can make them easier to learn. While closing the digital divide entirely needs intervention from the highest level, Software utilizing 1EdTech standards can help by enabling more schools to provide low-cost, easy-to-use tools for their students so that even if they don’t have tech at home, they can use it in the school building.
Conclusion
EdTech can bring fantastic benefits to schools, reducing teacher workload and making it easier to do previously onerous tasks like analyzing assessment data. While there are challenges to introducing and scaling EdTech, choosing tools that are certified in open standards can help you lower the cost, make it easier for everyone to use, and protect data privacy, among other advantages.
Read our blog to learn more about open standards that simplify assessment, and tips on how to overcome the challenges of online learning.
FAQs
What are examples of open standards? Common 1EdTech standards include SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model); LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability); QTI (Question and Test Interoperability); and Open Badges (digital credentialing). Learn more here: https://www.1edtech.org/standards/details
What are open standards used for? Open standards are used to make sure different tools and products work seamlessly together—for example, during data transfer—and adhere to certain guidelines making them more consistent.
Why are open standards important? Open standards provide clear guidelines to ensure tech products and tools work together and meet the same requirements, even when they’re from different providers. This can make it cheaper and easier for schools to implement EdTech and can ensure that products meet user needs, including accessibility.
