IMS Caliper Analytics™ Interoperability Standards Reach Candidate Final Release Status
Lake Mary, FL (PRWEB) May 06, 2015 -- IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global / IMS) today announced that the IMS Contributing Member organizations have progressed the breakthrough Caliper Analytics interoperability specification to candidate final release. The goal of Caliper Analytics is to reduce the cost of obtaining quality analytics data from digital educational products by orders of magnitude. As the educational community of institutions and suppliers cooperate on adopting Caliper the data needed to help students succeed and educational institutions improve will become readily available, thus delivering on the promise of digital teaching and learning.
Caliper has progressed through successful alpha and beta specification and software releases, providing code to enable data collection, known as Sensors (or the Sensor API) and data models (known as metric profiles). A developer community web site has been set up for IMS Members while the Caliper v1 work is offered as a candidate final release.
The Caliper workgroup in IMS is led by D2L, Elsevier, Intellify Learning, Learning Objects, McGraw-Hill Education, Penn State University, and the University of Michigan. Over the last 18 months implementations of the Caliper Sensor API and metric profiles have been tested across a wide range of products and are now operational at scale in several well-known educational products. Thus, the confidence level in the candidate final release is high.
A new developer community for IMS Affiliate Members and Contributing Members has been initiated with the following resources: Getting Started Guide, Implementation Guide with sample code, Sensor API code in six programming languages, conformance certification test harness and community technical forums. The developer community will support developers of applications, digital resources, learning platforms and learning event stores, as well as facilitated special interest groups.
IMS Global has also initiated a related activity known as Caliper RAM (Real-time Analytics Messaging). Caliper RAM is a workgroup led by Universities that are applying Caliper to implement real-time, actionable messaging alerts. Caliper RAM is co-chaired by University of Kentucky, University of California Berkeley and University of Texas Austin.
Caliper is sponsored in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, D2L, Gutenberg Technology, Unicon and Vital Source. Contact caliper(AT)imsglobal.org for additional information.
Quotes from supporters of Caliper:
“IMS’ Caliper specification is central to McGraw-Hill Education’s learning analytics product and research strategy. It’s poised now for rapid market adoption and will make a deep impact in industry the same way as LTI has," said Alfred Essa, VP, R&D and Analytics, McGraw-Hill Education.
"Our vision for a next generation digital learning ecosystem encompasses an integrated set of content repositories, learning applications, and analytics capabilities. This first release of Caliper is a significant step toward the realization of that vision, and the University of Michigan is proud to be leading the charge as a member of Team Caliper," said Laura Patterson, CIO and Associate Vice President, University of Michigan.
"The release of IMS Caliper removes a significant barrier to collectively assessing learner activity outside the learning management system (LMS). Penn State and other institutions recognized the need to have a holistic view of learning to enable student success in achieving academic pursuits," said John T. Harwood, Ph.D., Associate Vice Provost for Information Technology, Penn State University.
“Caliper is a fast emerging, education optimized learning data interoperability standard that is key to solving a fast emerging problem with invaluable learning data being silo’ed and inaccessible across an increasing number of learning apps from an increasing number of providers. Caliper helps enable the more holistic and comprehensive analytics based insights needed to enhance the learning, the instruction and the overall effectiveness of the curriculum and its discrete components,” said Chris Vento, IMS Caliper Co-Chair, CEO, Intellify Learning.
“Elsevier will deliver a superior efficacy-based learning experience enabled by the launch of the Caliper Analytics Standard. Our learning solutions will provide targeted educational tools that measure and produce evidence of improved outcomes,” said Mary Millar, Principal Software Engineer, Elsevier.
“D2L is strongly committed to Caliper as a key interoperability standard within the education industry. As such, we’re proud to be a supporter of Caliper through active contributing membership in the working group and creation of two reference implementations. We are looking forward to continued involvement, and believe Caliper will play a critical role in support of D2L’s vision of improving the way the world learns,” said Nick Oddson, Senior Vice President, Product Development, D2L.
"The University of Texas is committed to being a leader in an open community of peers contributing to this effort. We are working to bring together higher education leaders and commercial entities to support an open framework for building software that can work across different environments. New tools could help all stakeholders instrument and analyze online learning environments, and potentially intervene to improve them and the learner’s experience in them. Applying an open standard to work in real-time analytics messaging could help nurture the creative potential of innovative design to personalized/adaptive learning tools," said Phillip D. Long, Ph.D., Associate Vice Provost for Learning Sciences, Deputy Director, Center for Teaching and Learning/Continuing and Innovative Education, The University of Texas at Austin.
"It is incredibly exciting to see the Caliper v 1.0 standard released! Its wide adoption will enable institutions to use learning analytics in a powerful way to impact student outcomes. The real time component we are exploring with Caliper RAM adds an additional dimension that will build on and enrich the Caliper framework," said Jenn Stringer, Associate CIO, Academic Engagement, UC Berkeley.
"Open frameworks for sharing data, like the Caliper Analytics standards, will enable universities to collect critical learning data across an ecosystem of software providers. Through real-time data sharing standards we will be able to provide personalized messaging and support for students in online education and in face-to-face classroom settings while giving our faculty more insight into how well our students are performing. While leading edge today, personalized, real-time learning analytics will become commonplace tomorrow through standards like these,” said Vince Kellen, Senior Vice Provost, Analytics and Technologies, University of Kentucky.
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.
IMS Global, IMS Global Learning Consortium, http://www.imsglobal.org, +1 407.362.7783, [email protected]
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