Dive Brief:
- A new open interoperability standard called OneRoster has been created by a group of vendors, districts, and others in Florida calling themselves the IMS Global Learning Consortium.
- The standard is meant to aid workflow between schools and companies by presenting formatting for class-roster and sign-on account info.
- According to Education Week, the current industry leader is a third-party company called Clever, which "manage[s] the flow of roster information between tens of thousands of schools and hundreds of digital-content providers."
Dive Insight:
Should the standard catch on in schools, there would no longer be a need for middleman businesses like Clever to exist. That would likely come as a disappointment to Apple, which last week revealed it had acquired one of Clever's competitors, LearnSprout.
Having a uniform way for data to flow between digital content providers and schools means savings not only in terms of time and ease of use, but in dollars and cents.
To that end, getting districts to agree on a standard is a tall order, complicated by the fact that certain business interests might work against a common standard, since it would likely erase an existing income stream.
