Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Convergence of standards in the education technology - Ed Tech industry

Education is a national focus and a complete re-thinking of the assessment landscape of kids abilities is shaping up in the country.
Most of us are familiar with standard SOL testing, mid year assessments from a variety of providers such as Eearson, Iowa state skills test, Stanford achievement test, ACT, PSAT, SAT etc. The challenge in the approach is that they are disjoint and not coordinated to provide a comprehensive picture of the kids continuos skills measurement. To combat this a variety of movements are creating frameworks to have a common method of skills assessment with varying levels as the kids progress from 3 to 12.
Some examples are below

Common Core - standards creation - http://www.corestandards.org/

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium - http://www.smarterbalanced.org/

Partnership for Assessment for Readiness for College and Careers --

http://www.parcconline.org/parcc-assessment

Ok, what has these have to do with Architecture. Architecture is prime and central to these efforts.
The only way to make such disparate assessement efforts systems and tests to talk to each other is via interoperability. Standards based integration and interoperability is paramount to acheive such mission.

Ed- Tech industry has been creating such standards, a list of the top standards are as below -

Assessment interoperability framework -  
https://ceds.ed.gov/aif.aspx

Common Education Data Standards - 
https://ceds.ed.gov/whatIsCEDS.aspx

School Interperability Framework -https://www.sifassociation.org/Specification/Pages/default.aspx


IMS Question & Test Interoperability™ Specification 

http://www.imsglobal.org/question/


Accessible Portable Item Protocol (APIP)™

http://www.imsglobal.org/apip/

Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council (PESC)
http://www.pesc.org/


Organizations building systems for creating tests, distributing tests , scoring tests, reporting scores and data regarding tests would have to consider these standards when deriving architectures for their assessment systems.

To be compliant with SBAC or PARCC these standards become critical and would help to gain and win state contracts for assessment work.

More to come .....



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