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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.

What is troubling us with Moodle and why it is crucial for NRENs to collaborate on developing customized solution/s

The need for quickly scalable LMS infrastructure was on many NRENs agenda last year, and continues to be. In addition, NRENs face specific needs for Moodle deployment ranging from central to local administration, migration of existing courses into a new solution or availability of specific plugins, to name just a few.

The possibility of developing common solution that would meet specific needs of different NRENs’, and in the same time use benefits of collaborative development, administration and future maintenance between NRENs is a challenge that we would like to address in the next TF-EDU session. The session will be hosted by CARNET Moodle team, with the support of partnering NRENs (TBA).

Working from the Up2U Application Toolbox (a set of interoperable and integrated services for education and research that include LMS, video conferencing, Jupyter Notebook, file sync&share, etc) in which basic customisations, and out-of-the-box & one-size-fits-all package is available, we are proposing additional steps.

In this session we will discuss how to work together in addressing specific needs of different NRENs’, including:

• customizations already developed by NRENs 
• existing user data.
• automatic course creation (so the administrators don't need to do this)
• creating categories for each institution in which local administrator can open courses
• migration of existing courses into a new solution
• availability of specific plugins and users (e.g. Dyslexic mod).

In its July 2020 Schrems II judgment, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared the European Commission’s Privacy Shield Decision invalid on account of invasive US surveillance programmes, thereby making transfers of personal data on the basis of the Privacy Shield Decision illegal. This affects the use of cloud services in our European (Union) countries.

Hence, we would like to invite you to an infoshare and discussion about Schrems II and the impact for educational services:

• Introduction to the approach for Edu services in Norway – Vegard Moen
• Infoshare about the situation for Edu services in other countries
• Discussion about the impact for future development of the cloud based Edu ecosystem and possible collaboration

More information about the judgement: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2020/652073/EPRS_ATA(2020)652073_EN.pdf