IMS Global Achieves Record Levels of Revenue and Member Growth
Lake Mary, FL (PRWEB) April 20, 2016 -- IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and impact, has released their 2015 Annual Report. As part of its commitment to openness and transparency to members and stakeholders worldwide, the annual report is available to the public online at https://www.imsglobal.org/sites/default/files/2015annualReport.pdf.
In 2015 the IMS community, especially the Contributing Members, achieved extraordinary growth – the best in the organization’s 20-year history. Revenues jumped 21% while the number of member organizations grew 24%. Notably, 2015 was the single largest year of membership growth in IMS history, adding 65 net new members. After ten years of consecutive growth, IMS Global is now one of the largest and best resourced member-based standards consortia in the world in any sector.
“We believe that the tremendous growth achieved in 2015 is a clear indicator of the compelling value proposition of IMS Global to enable better educational experiences and outcomes worldwide,” said Rob Abel, Ed.D, Chief Executive Officer, IMS Global. “Interoperability is the lynchpin to enabling better digital teaching and learning experiences, and leading institutions, governments, and suppliers are finding that aggressive adoption of IMS interoperability standards provides a better path to supporting the future of education.”
In addition to member and revenue growth, IMS Global made significant progress around five key initiatives to make it easier for institutions around the world to create and scale efficient and effective digital teaching and learning environments.
Via the IMS Learning Platforms, Apps and Tools Initiative, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, member organizations are making tremendous progress towards achieving “plug & play” interoperability. In 2015, the number of learning platforms supporting LTI nearly doubled to over seventy, as did the number of LTI certified tools to nearly 200. Today, there are nearly 400 products that have achieved IMS Global conformance certification, with millions of IMS-enabled interactions among leading learning platforms, learning tools, digital resources and e-assessments occurring every day.
IMS members are defining what it means to offer an effective and integrated digital curriculum. Most notably, IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) has evolved into a K-12 standard for rostering of all the digital learning apps, tools and platforms with student and course information, called OneRoster™. OneRoster is becoming the fastest adopted IMS standard of all time as it will save school districts and technology suppliers a very large and unnecessary expenditure of time and resources.
In 2015, a significant milestone was achieved to help institutions collect and analyze data to support student success. IMS Caliper Analytics™, which provides click stream data on learning activities from learning resources, tools and platforms, achieved final release of version one with a set of ten leading suppliers achieving conformance certification. Caliper is the first open standard for analytics driven and owned by the education sector.
IMS demonstrated several firsts in the area of Digital Credentials in 2015, with the goal being to enable a major leap ahead in the ability of educational technology ecosystem to support an interoperable comprehensive student record. IMS demonstrated interoperability of a variety of supporting technologies required to enable Competency-based Education. IMS also announced a collaboration with Mozilla Foundation and MacArthur Foundation to further the use of Open Badges in Education.
IMS’s work in e-Assessment including Question & Test Interoperability® (QTI®) and Accessible Portable Item Protocol® (APIP®) has enabled the evolution to digital assessment as a more responsive and reliable alternative to paper-based testing. In 2015 over 15 million tests based on QTI/APIP were delivered as part of the inaugural phase of the U.S. Race to the Top Assessment program. QTI-based e-assessment has also gone live in the Netherlands.
The latest IMS Global achievements will be announced during the 2016 Learning Impact Leadership Institute, May 23-26, in San Antonio, Texas.
Statements of sector leadership and support for IMS Global:
“Since integrating SAFARI Montage with IBM and Desire2Learn via IMS LTI standards, Gwinnett County Public Schools has logged over 1.5 million plays of SAFARI Montage content in the first three months alone.” - Tim Beekman, President and Co-Founder, SAFARI Montage
“Education technology is unique in both its potential to positively impact our children and its relative lack of technical uniformity. The EdTech landscape is arguably the industry most in need of unifying standards and the mission of IMS. With a common set of standards fostering interoperability, students can focus on learning, teachers on teaching, and developers on designing the best teaching and learning software possible.” - Stephen Laster, Chief Digital Officer, McGraw-Hill Education
“In 2015, Microsoft delivered two LTI apps (OneNote and Office Mix) and we are actively working with our partners and customers to explore other opportunities. We’re delighted with the feedback we have received from educators and students that are benefitting from having OneNote Class Notebooks and mixes integrated seamlessly within their learning platforms. We feel a standards based approach is most beneficial in our multi-platform world throughout Education and see a growing collaboration with our Partners especially our Publisher and LMS partners who see the benefits of key standards.” - Anthony Salcito, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector – Education, Microsoft Corporation
“By adopting IMS Standards like LTI, we have enabled millions of teachers and students to access hundreds of different tools in meaningful ways within our platform. In fact, nearly 100% of Canvas institutions have at least one LTI tool added at their account. In addition, these standards are now allowing us to change the ways that we think about data and analytics, our learning platforms and even the new solutions we build internally.” - Melissa Loble, Vice President Partnerships, Instructure
“IMS standards continue to simplify access to learning content for our customers,” says Rick Johnson, VP of Product Strategy for VitalSource Technologies. VitalSource Bookshelf® users have opened more than 40 million textbooks in the past academic year through LTI integrations that take only minutes to set up.” - Rick Johnson, Vice President of Product Development and Sales Engineering, VitalSource Technologies
“At Pearson we appreciate the power of industry standards to improve access, quality and scale of digital curriculum solutions. As a small example, we have delivered well over 500M QTI-based items to K12 students in 2015 alone and during peak instructional hours our systems deliver and score over 10,000 QTI 2.1 items per minute, 5 days a week. Our customers increasingly appreciate the interoperability benefits of LTI, Thin Common Cartridge and OneRoster standards to free up hours for more teaching and learning and we are committed to working side by side with them and our fellow supplier partners to achieve this common goal.” - Michael Chai, Chief Digital Officer, Pearson
“Adopting IMS standards has made it exponentially easier to design, build, deliver and scale adoption of our new courseware products for colleges and universities. An organization of our size could never support the heavy burden of point-to-point integrations that was necessary before IMS standards were in common use. Using LTI and the Thin Common Cartridge, integrating systems and content is an essential but easily-supported component of our product strategy.” - Kim Thanos, CEO, Lumen Learning
“The Turnitin LTI tool provider was certified by the IMS as LTI 1.1 compliant in 2013. We started to heavily market Turnitin LTI in 2014/2015, and since then, adoption and usage has significantly increased. Our Turnitin LTI tool provider is now being used worldwide, offering a seamless integration with Turnitin via 25+ IMS Global certified LTI tool consumers. Since 2013 we have documented that 1,115 admins have configured their Turnitin accounts to use an LTI integration; 311,251 assignments have been created in Turnitin via LTI; 856,265 users have launched into the Turnitin LTI tool provider; and 4,605,158 submissions to Turnitin have been made via LTI.” - Jessica Wells, Principal Product Manager, Integrations, Turnitin
“Adoption of IMS Global Learning standards can be a true catalyst for growth for companies serving the education industry. By embracing open technology standards, ClassLink is creating new and better ways to serve schools and partners alike. Schools adopting our single sign-on and secure roster delivery products are giving students and teachers instant access to their digital resources and they love it. Further, with the rapid adoption of IMS OneRoster, a surge of publishers and platform providers are working together to counterbalance fee-based SSO platforms that require proprietary technologies. Through our work with IMS Global community, we are building lasting partnerships for the benefit of teachers and students everywhere.” - Berj Akian, CEO & Founder, ClassLink
About IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global)
IMS Global is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. IMS members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. IMS sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology. For more information visit http://www.imsglobal.org.
IMS Global, IMS Global Learning Consortium, http://www.imsglobal.org, +1 407.362.7783, [email protected]
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