TF-EDU Community discussion agenda and topics

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. By leaving this interop 

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.

Nynke de Boer (IMS Global)

Michael Webb (Jisc)

Jasmijn Jacobs-Wijn (SURF)

Wietze de Vries (Sunet)

Links:

http://www.imsglobal.org/event/europe/2020
http://www.imsglobal.org/europe2019/presentations

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLysC4Zd9-FmD773cUYratfgiwBtLGr7Jb

http://www.imsglobal.org/dc/summit/2021

 https://www.eduhub.ch/events/SWITCHverify-and-blockchain-basics/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DASCcO1vIyjzlTO7XES23mNRfFvXGT824dtIrLxWvTg/edit

One year ago, TF-EDU was officially launched. At the end of our first year, the Steering Committee have been busy discussing how to best support our community this year. We would like to invite you to join us in this discussion, where we will discuss issues such as:

• What educational services are NRENs offering across the spectrum of education stages, from higher education and universities, through to schools?
• What are the most critical educational services at the moment?
• How mature are those services, how are they being developed and by who?

To open the session, we will have a short presentation on the previous TF-EDU survey on education services and activities, followed by TF-EDU Steering Committee members giving their experiences of the services they or their institutions have found useful, their needs and their challenges, concluding with an info share regarding the launch of the 2021 Annual Survey.

Discuss with us the topics and themes that spark the interest of our community (and that is you as well) and how you can be engaged in future TF-EDU activities.