TF-EDU: The importance of standards with the EdTech ecosystem

All over the world, ICT is used more and more within education, especially during the COVID pandemia over the last year, where online education has become so important. To add educational value, many new ICT tools have been implemented at the universities, forming the so-called EdTech ecosystem. 

In order to make this EdTech ecosystem easy to create, reliable, flexible, future proof and accessible to all, it is essential to also focus on interoperability between tools, sharing data, data governance and accessibility. The easiest and most sustainable way to do this, is to work with existing and well-adopted EdTech standards (agreements). IMS Global is a community of  institutions, vendors, schools, publishers and other EdTech related partners, that has developed a series of well adopted EdTech standards and tools, to help you to create a robust EdTech ecosystem. Examples are LTI, OpenBadges, EduAPI and QTI and the App Vetting tool. These standards form the foundation of the EdTech ecosystem, LTI for example defines the interoperability between tools on a detailed level. 

In this session, we will share some practical examples of standards, introduce some of the relevant EdTech standards and discuss how you as an institution can benefit from them. Finally, we will listen to some of the members of the community on how they contribute to the IMS Global community and discuss with you what role you could play in there. 

To get inspired for this session, we recommend to watch this video of the Technical University of Eindhoven.

A more detailed information document on the standards of IMS Global in relation to GÉANT is here. This document was created based on questions asked at the GÉANT Education TF meeting in Budapest, November 2019.

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The purpose of creating community space was to intensify our engagement with the community, addressing broader scope of challenges and opportunities. 

The first topic covers NREN services versus commercial solutions.

Agenda and link to join can be found at:

https://edu.nl/xgnfh