{"id":5791,"date":"2020-09-07T13:25:16","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T17:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/?p=5791"},"modified":"2020-09-07T13:25:16","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T17:25:16","slug":"enabling-a-just-education-and-educational-technology-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/2020\/09\/enabling-a-just-education-and-educational-technology-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Enabling a Just Education and Educational Technology Future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Enabling a Just Education and Educational Technology Future<br \/>\n<\/strong><strong>PI: Dr. Charles R. Severance, University of Michigan School of Information<br \/>\n<\/strong><strong>Unsolicited Funding Proposal &#8211; 2020-09<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation support for the $2.4 million dollar Sakai Project to the University of Michigan and others in 2004, is probably the most impactful philanthropic investment in educational technology of all time.\u00a0 The Sakai Project set out to solve the problems of software interoperability and data portability by developing an open source Learning Management system that would implement and demonstrate best practices to the educational technology industry.<\/p>\n<p>In 2004 and 2005, by leveraging its Andrew W. Mellon Foundation support, Sakai quickly delivered on all three of its core goals.\u00a0 We released four versions of Sakai (1.0, 1.5, 2.0, and 2.1). In late 2004, Sakai worked with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imsglobal.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">IMS<\/a> to form the IMS Tools Interoperability working group and in mid-2005, Sakai worked with IMS to form the IMS Common Cartridge Working Group.<\/p>\n<p>Fifteen years later, these efforts have matured into an LMS market place committed to standards and interoperability.\u00a0 When the latest version of IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI Advantage) was released in 2019, five leading LMS vendors (Sakai, Moodle,\u00a0 D2L,\u00a0 Blackboard, and Canvas) announced support for the standard on the same day.<\/p>\n<p>While the software interoperability efforts created by Sakai are a great success, there are larger concerns in the LMS and educational technology market that must be addressed to assure fair,\u00a0 safe, and just access to education &#8211; particularly students in at-risk populations and for students outside the US\/Europe:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>At this point, 60% of the LMS marketplace is using proprietary cloud-only solutions owned by private-equity companies.\u00a0 While these solutions are convenient for higher education, handing sensitive and private student activity data to these third parties who treat it as an asset is a concerning trend.<\/li>\n<li>The lack of an open-source and standards-based learning object repository (LOR) continues to leave high quality material stuck in LMS systems.\u00a0 When we reduce barriers to content reuse, we can broaden access to education regardless of geography or economic situation.<\/li>\n<li>The lack of a MOOC platform that is interoperable, easy-to-use, and based on standards\u00a0restricts MOOC-like approaches to the privileged, wealthy and proprietary.\u00a0 None of the current MOOC platforms participate in educational technology standards activities.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Sakai, Tsugi, and Apereo open source efforts will be able to achieve these goals with a reasonable level of investment.\u00a0 Sakai is a mature LMS with some of the highest satisfaction ratings in the market, Tsugi is a simple, standards based learning object repository (LOR) and Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) hosting platform.\u00a0 Tsugi has many technical aspects of LOR and LMS integration solved but so far has not had enough UI\/UX investment to be used directly by a non-technical teacher.<\/p>\n<p>Our open-source efforts are already working on these goals as fast as we can.\u00a0 This proposal seeks funds to greatly accelerate efforts to (1) maximum protection of private student activity data, (2) standards and open source infrastructure to support reusable learning content, and (3) a MOOC platform that makes the creation and teaching of free and open educational experiences available to every teacher and student in the world.\u00a0 It is a bold vision and we are well positioned to achieve these goals with sufficient resources.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Note: <\/strong>I wrote this as a response to an RFI with a goal of ensuring a Just Educational Future from an unnamed funding agency.\u00a0 The RFI turned out to be aimed at an audience that did not include me so I\u00a0 made it a blog post.\u00a0 If any funding agency is interested in funding the work &#8211; let me know.\u00a0 I am looking for about $5M over a three years period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enabling a Just Education and Educational Technology Future PI: Dr. Charles R. Severance, University of Michigan School of Information Unsolicited Funding Proposal &#8211; 2020-09 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation support for the $2.4 million dollar Sakai Project to the University of Michigan and others in 2004, is probably the most impactful philanthropic investment in educational [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5791"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5797,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5791\/revisions\/5797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}