As educational leaders consider their strategic goals for the future, it’s clear educational technology will be key to success.
What’s also clear is that the budgets to achieve those goals will be limited. While only a little more than half of higher ed institutions expect IT budgets to increase, the increase is only about two percent. In comparison, 48 percent of higher ed institutions expect budgets to stay the same or decrease, according to Gartner’s higher education predictions for 2024.
That means CIOs and other IT leaders will need to be intentional and persuasive when it comes to selecting new technologies. To do that, they need data. They need ways to show that the tools they put their time and money into are helping improve teaching and learning.
While 1EdTech’s Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)® standard makes learning tool and resource integrations faster, easier, and at a lower cost, educators still need their edtech providers to provide a more secure way to extract the data being shared in those integrations. If the data can also help identify problem areas in a course or curriculum or provide learner insights in real-time, that only makes the tools that provide that data more valuable.
The good news for those institutions and edtech suppliers is that it’s possible to give educators the data they want and need while also following interoperability standards that will simplify any future evolutions or innovations. I’m talking about LTI™ Advantage Data.
By combining the already widely used LTI Advantage with the basic requirements for the Caliper Analytics® standard to capture tool use and engagement, LTI Advantage Data creates an “out of the box” data flow back to your institution that generates consistent and trusted information without needing to create a custom solution for every partnership.
Basically, LTI Advantage helps the tools talk to one another, while Caliper helps the tools talk to the educators.
So, what does LTI Advantage Data actually do? It provides a data flow that doesn’t require any custom development and provides data needed to understand the return on investment in learning tools and gather insights into the learning process in a consistent and trusted format, allowing for:
- Understanding of tool usage and student engagement with tools sent to your institution’s dashboards/data stores
- Understanding how the platform is being used, what is effective, and what is having an impact on learning
- Educators to view student progress in one place by leveraging LTI Advantage’s Assignment and Grade Services, allowing for grade/assignment scores to pass back from all tools to the learning platforms
- Strategies to connect data back to individual users across tools and platforms to help educators identify patterns and trends
Standardizing the process provides the data in a familiar and trusted format, removing the need for custom integrations.
Watch this short video to better understand how LTI Advantage Data can help your institution get the data needed to assess how the technologies used on your campus impact outcomes.
If you’re interested in learning more, attend one of our upcoming events.
- At the Digital Credentials Summit (March 4-6, 2024, in New Orleans), look for my session "LTI Advantage Data: Raising the Bar on Data."
- We'll have more for you at the Learning Impact Conference (June 3-6, 2024, in Salt Lake City), including help to get certified in LTI Advantage Data.
About the Author
Jacques Menasche
Jacques Menasche serves as a technical program manager for 1EdTech Consortium, where he leverages his extensive knowledge of education technology and interoperability and his ability to articulate complex ideas and technologies to all levels of understanding. Jacques has over 12 years of experience in the education technology industry, where he helped lead the charge for interoperability and seamless integrations.
Jacques began his career in K-12 education, managing district integrations with edtech vendors and identity services. He then moved into the edtech sector, leveraging his experience to help other districts integrate with digital teaching and learning technologies best.
