We just wrapped up an empowering week at the 2026 Learning Impact Conference in San Francisco, where one thing was clear: education technology is entering a new era, and the infrastructure behind it must evolve just as quickly.
Cybersecurity threats are growing more sophisticated, AI is compressing timelines, digital credentials are becoming part of a global learning and employment economy, and governments are increasingly treating standards as policy infrastructure. For 25 years, 1EdTech has helped close the seams between systems. Now, those seams are about trust, governance, understanding, and responsible use at scale.
That is why we announced a new organizational structure, initiatives, and partnerships to help meet this moment. And as Learning Impact confirmed, we have the community to do it.
Addressing More Sophisticated Cybersecurity Threats
Trust is now one of the central challenges facing education technology. Recent cybersecurity incidents make clear that no certification, rubric, or compliance framework can guarantee complete protection, but they also underscore the importance of shared trust frameworks more than ever.
That starts with clarity: data privacy and security are connected, but different. Privacy focuses on what data is collected, who can access it, how long it is kept, and what can be minimized. Security focuses on protecting that data from bad actors. Institutions and suppliers need both.
1EdTech’s data privacy certification and security rubric help establish shared expectations, support better procurement and vetting, and create a foundation for accountability.
In addition, institutions and providers need to work together to define a timeline to complete the migration to Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) 1.3. This includes tools and homegrown resources using the outdated LTI 1.1 standard, which 1EdTech stopped supporting and certifying in 2022 as it no longer reflects current security best practices. This cannot be an immediate or forced cutover as institutions and providers require runway. An agreed end-of-life for LTI 1.1 support will provide the clarity and urgency needed to begin that work. Institutions should also require all of their providers to certify on the upgraded LTI 1.3 standard.
The value of 1EdTech’s standards and resources is not in promising perfection. It is in helping the community ask better questions, share responsibility, and improve together. Real progress comes from clear guidance, deliberate improvement, and collaboration, not blame after an incident. The goal is to make the whole room safer for everyone.
Look for new ways to get engaged in this work in the coming months. The first, join a webinar, “EdTech Security: Building Trust Through Shared Responsibility,,” June 25, from 1:30-2:30PM ET. Register here.
Helping AI Move Responsibly as Timelines Compress
Artificial intelligence is already changing how educational information is used, from curriculum and credentials to learner data and institutional policies. Without a trusted, governed context, AI systems will fill in the gaps from whatever sources they can access, creating risks around privacy, consent, provenance, bias, fake credentials, institutional lock-in, and learner agency.
The answer is not to slow innovation, but to shape it. That is why 1EdTech is advancing a trusted learning context: an open, auditable way for AI systems to access the information they need to support teaching and learning, and no more. Recent convenings and hackathons show how quickly the community can move when the need is clear.
1EdTech will release a request for comments on the results of this work later this summer.
Supporting Digital Credentials in a Global Learning and Employment Economy
Digital credentials are becoming essential to a global learning and employment economy. Open Badges already help millions of learners share trusted proof of what they know and can do, but broader adoption depends on making credentials easier to issue, understand, verify, and use in decisions like admissions, hiring, and career advancement.
At Learning Impact, 1EdTech released two reports on what is needed to close these adoption gaps.
Based on these findings, 1EdTech is actively evaluating new and expanded initiatives to address these gaps, building on its existing portfolio of work.
Educators, employers, and technology providers are now working together to better align systems and standards through efforts such as:
- TrustEd Credentials Open Badges 3.0 Profile to provide a foundation for minimal data requirements in digital credentials.
- Edu-API Credential Provisioning Taskforce to define how to move credential data out of educational systems into credentials and credential platforms.
- CASE Global Ecosystem to create a public infrastructure that ensures that learning standards, competencies, and credentials remain publicly governed, interoperable, and accessible across K–12, higher education, and workforce systems.
As credentials move across education and workforce systems, learners need confidence that their achievements will remain meaningful, institutions need trusted ways to connect outcomes and credentials, and employers need clearer signals about the skills a credential represents. In an AI-driven world, this shared infrastructure helps ensure skills and competencies remain open, portable, verifiable, and controlled by learners, educators, and institutions, not closed systems or unclear algorithms.
Advancing Standards as Policy Infrastructure
Governments are increasingly treating standards as policy infrastructure, a way to support national priorities, protect public investment, and create more consistent digital learning environments.
That shift makes adoption more important than ever. Standards cannot simply be published; they must be implemented, tested, certified, supported, and aligned so they are useful to developers, institutions, educators, and learners. That is why 1EdTech is investing in tools like the Standards Portal, Build Portal, TrustEd Apps Management Suite (TAMS), and Uniform ID to make standards easier to put into practice, products easier to identify and manage, and trusted adoption easier to scale.
Building the Structure to Sustain the Work
The work this moment demands needs durable investment, international reach, philanthropic support, strategic partnerships, and structures that can sustain public-good infrastructure over time.
That is the purpose of 1EdTech’s new organizational structure. 1EdTech Consortium will continue as the member-driven standards body where we will continue to collaborate on community-driven priorities, while 1EdTech Global Inc., a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit, will coordinate public-interest digital infrastructure, research, education, and ecosystem initiatives.
This strengthens, not changes,1EdTech’s mission by giving the community more capacity to support innovation, expand globally, and steward open, trusted standards for the long term. One early example is the planned integration of the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library, giving this trusted open-access resource a sustainable home while preserving its identity, independence, and wiki model under a public charter.
The Standard We Build Together
The next era of education technology demands public-interest projects with sustainable homes, governed infrastructure with active stewardship, and a community prepared to move faster without sacrificing trust.
Twenty-five years ago, the work was making systems talk to each other. Today, the work is making sure the systems that learn from the world’s learners answer to the world’s learners.
That future must be open. It must be governed. It must be worthy of the learners it serves.
Together is the new standard.
About the Author
Curtiss Barnes is the CEO of 1EdTech. He has over 35 years of experience in the education industry and expertise in a broad range of enterprise and instructional systems supporting education's core missions. He has held roles at universities, technology start-ups, large enterprise businesses, and courseware and publishing companies.
Curtiss holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Clark University.
