1EdTech and Me

I’m delighted to announce that I have joined the great people at 1EdTech (formerly IMS Global) as their Chief Strategy Officer. The Empirical Educator Project (EEP) and ALDA are being merged into the organization. I will still write here at e-Literate. In fact, I will probably be writing more again. I will share my personal (though work-related) views here. I will also write in my official capacity on the 1EdTech Learning Impact blog, which I encourage you to follow.

In a completely unexpected way, this role promises to be the culmination of the work I’ve been doing about for 20 years on this blog and striving toward my entire professional life. In this post, I’d like to tell you more about that.

Putting the “ed” into “EdTech”

I’m a teacher from a family of teachers. If you just look at the educator part of Tim Walz’s biography and values, he looks a lot like my father. Dad grew up in Wisconsin, taught social studies, and eventually became an elementary school principal. He married an educator and raised three educators, all of whom married educators (though not all of us are immediately recognizable as such). As my role model, Dad taught me that supporting educators is an honorable calling. And difficult in its own way.

I first grew interested in EdTech (though we didn’t have a name for it back then) because it forced me to become more conscious of and thoughtful about my teaching instincts. Teaching online required me to recognize and translate some teaching moves, let go of others, and invent new ones. It helped me become more thoughtful about my practice. Later, I discovered that it helped me open up other educators to being more thoughtful about their practice in a context where they didn’t feel defensive.

Over the years, as I grew professionally and thought out loud with all of you in my public writing, my sense of both context and craft broadened and deepened. I learned about learning science. I became aware of the complex, continuously growing, and evolving ecosystem that creates and supports educational technology. My calling to serve educators evolved into a drive to facilitate systemic change.

What force is powerful enough to create systemic change? It’s people in the system working together toward a common cause.

Problem solving, together

Throughout the years that I’ve interacted with 1EdTech in various ways, I’ve always thought of it first and foremost as a community of people who work together on concrete projects that serve education. Importantly, most of the people who do that work are not employed by 1EdTech. Their work is supported by their EdTech company, university, or school. So really, 1EdTech is a community of collaborating organizations and a community of collaborating individuals. Both are important. 1EdTech’s major output (though not its only output) is interoperability specifications.

Once these specifications are completed, the collaboration continues. In fact, it broadens. The people who create the software go back to their teammates. Together, those teams incorporate the specifications into their various products. Many educators use those newly enhanced products to help them with teaching and learning. They inevitably find problems, dream up new ideas, and find new needs. Their feedback brings the 1EdTech collaborators back to the table, where they improve the specification. And so on.

Being a part of an organization where people across the sector come together to solve real problems is…intoxicating. It’s what I’ve always wanted. As an educator, I believe that the values and principles behind the process are very close to my ideals of teaching and learning. When we build together to solve real, meaningful, unsolved problems, we learn together. The things we learn often help us solve harder meaningful problems.

My career to date has weaved in and out of contact with 1EdTech, sometimes being pretty close to it and other times being fairly distant. But regardless of my own involvement at any given moment, some of the friends I most admire in 1EdTech have been directly involved. The organization is akin to what mathematicians call a “strange attractor.”

1EdTech’s standards, through their interactions with market forces, shape a chaotic system into underlying patterns. They create structures and behaviors that aren’t immediately apparent but have a lasting effect on the industry’s evolution.

These standards may not always dictate the immediate path of EdTech development, but they serve as an invisible guide, channeling innovation and collaboration within certain bounds. Market forces like vendor competition, regulatory pressures, or institutional demand interact with these standards, creating product development’s complex and sometimes chaotic appearance. Yet, if you observe over time, patterns emerge, and the influence of 1EdTech becomes more visible in the form of common practices, compliance incentives, interoperable solutions, and even cultural change.

Let’s take a closer look at how that happens.

The lore

I’ve come to know 1EdTech through the people who work there—both staff and volunteers—and the story they tell. I will name a few of the member participants throughout its history because, even more than most organizations, 1EdTech runs on them. They are important. My anecdotes will focus on collaborators who are not 1EdTech staff. I will have lots to say about my wonderful new 1EdTech colleagues in the future. But today, I want to focus on the dynamic that brings people together from the outside—even from competing companies—to collaborate for the common good.

The stories I will tell are not definitive and may not be entirely accurate. However, I either experienced them myself or heard them from other 1EdTech participants. In other words, they are stories that participants tell themselves and each other about the collaboration (as I remember them).

Let’s start at the beginning. In the 1990s, two guys from Cornell started making hay with a product called “Blackboard.” Across the continent, a product called “WebCT” sprung up in British Columbia. There were others. It became clear that a product category was forming. At the time, these virtual classrooms were being called Instructional Management Systems, or IMSs. One person following this change closely was a guy named Ray Henderson, who was working at Pearson at the time. Maybe you’ve heard of Ray if you’ve been around long enough. Maybe you knew him from his tour of duty at Blackboard. Or from his leadership at ANGEL, which Blackboard acquired. Or from eCollege. He has been one of the most quietly influential people in EdTech during the decades that I’ve been in it.

While at Pearson, Ray had the foresight to realize that the publishers would have to integrate with or import content into these new IMSs. They needed some kind of common import format. This would help the publishers and, importantly, it would also help the students. Curricular materials needed to be accessible inside the digital classroom. So Ray and some of his counterparts at competing companies banded together, threw some money in a pot, and formed an alliance to create the Common Cartridge standard.

That founding story illustrates the foundational spirit animating 1EdTech to this day. Interoperability is funded by enlightened self-interest. Students must navigate a digital world. We must work together to make digital education navigable for them and the people who help them learn.

In those early years, I was not yet a part of this world. In October of 2006, I wrote (as an outsider) that learning platforms, which by then were called LMSs here in the US, should not only import but also export Common Cartridge. Why? Because LMS lock-in was a harder problem back then. I was working at the State University of New York System, trying to move thirty-odd campuses off of a dying LMS, and wondering how it could be less painful next time. One part of the answer was to make a technical standard that allowed a course to be moved out of one LMS and into another. If I recall correctly, ANGEL, under the leadership of Ray Henderson at the time, became the first LMS to export in Common Cartridge format.

It may not seem like much now. Common Cartridge isn’t used as heavily for either of these purposes anymore (although you might be surprised by its continuing value in parts of the EdTech ecosystem that may be invisible to you). But at the time, it enabled educators and students to bring digital curricular materials into their digital classrooms. It made moving from one LMS to another less painful, helping to enable real competition in the LMS space.

Two months after I wrote the Common Cartridge export post, I found myself employed by Oracle. There, I worked with people like Curtiss Barnes—current CEO of 1EdTech—and Linda Feng—current Chief Architect at D2L and 1EdTech Board member, among other great colleagues. At the time, SISs and LMSs didn’t integrate. Student rosters had to be hand-imported from the SIS to the LMS, or else expensive consulting services would be required to build a custom integration. Every time. Just to get the students and instructors imported into the same digital classroom. At the end of the semester, instructors had to copy final grades from their LMS digital grade book into their SIS digital grade book.

It was madness. An outrageous waste of valuable staff and instructor time. Plus, the students often had to wait for days between when they registered for a class and when they actually could access it in the LMS. So my Oracle colleagues and I went to IMS. We worked with EdTech partners, competitors, and university folks who dealt with this integration problem. Together, the group created a new version of the LIS standard to solve these problems. Unless you deal directly with the guts of these systems, you have probably never heard of LIS. That’s good. The vast majority of you shouldn’t have to. Nobody focused on teaching and learning should ever have to spend a minute of their time wondering how grades travel from one electronic grade book to another. That’s the point. You should know that many colleagues from across the sector thought hard about this problem so that you don’t have to. That’s important too.

At about the same time that a group of us were working on LIS, 1EdTech unleashed a madman upon the world. Or maybe it was the other way around. A guy named Chuck Severance was hellbent on plugging the learning tools he wanted into the LMS he wanted. Up until then, if somebody wanted to build a special add-on for your discipline, like a molecule modeler for chemistry or a writing checker for English, they had to build their integration for the most widely adopted platform (in the US)—Blackboard—and might or might not be able to afford to integrate with the others. This, too, kept out potential LMS companies that could compete to provide better products. Chuck was ideal for this work because he owned both a problem and a “product.” His problem was that, as a University of Michigan computer science professor, he wanted to teach his way with his tools. He was also a major developer and, for a period of time, the Chief Architect of the Sakai open-source learning management system. He decided he would make sure that his preferred teaching tools would integrate with his preferred LMS. And he had an idea how to make it happen. (He was inspired by previous 1EdTech work led by Chris Vento, my former manager at Cengage and another EdTech legend that I have written about before and will almost certainly write about again.)

Chuck went on a mission. Literally. He drove to LMS companies and tool providers. He’d stay at nearby hotels. And he’d tell them, “Hey, since I was passing by, I thought I’d stop in, and we could knock out an LTI implementation for your product. It’ll only take a day or two.” And they did. In exchange, Chuck tattooed their logo on his arm. I tried, unsuccessfully, to convince him to tattoo the Cengage logo on his forehead. That’s a pretty high bar to measure the limit of someone’s commitment.

Chuck changed the world.1 I don’t have the data to prove this, but I bet if you graphed the growth of ASU-GSV attendance against the growth of LTI integrations during those early years, the curves would align closely. Suddenly, a wide range of tools became economically viable to create and sell. LMS usage grew as virtual classrooms became more fit for purpose. They could transform generic electronic classrooms into chemistry labs, software programming labs, writing classrooms, virtual field trips, and many other specialized learning environments. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Instructure rose to prominence at this time. One of their early major PR pushes was to create an LTI exchange. They saw it as important to their growth. And all you VCs reading this? I challenge you to find out which of your portfolio companies benefit from implementing LTI or some other 1EdTech standard.

I could tell more stories. I’ve met so many great people who have contributed to 1EdTech in one way or another. There is alchemy here. Somehow, commercial interests, personal passions, friendships, rivalries, and a lot of diplomacy produce magic. It’s easy to see where EdTech is broken. We quickly forget after something broken is fixed. After something good is made better. After people solve a problem together and they…move on to the next problem. This work is largely invisible to most. Yet its impact has been large and unpredictable at times.

I’ve given you a tiny taste of what the organization has done so far. Before I took this job, I consulted for 1EdTech for three months. I’ve looked under the hood. The potential to do more is enormous. I’m all in now.

1EdTech, EEP, and me

I’ll let you in on the magic behind 1EdTech. It’s not that complicated, although it is very hard. People want products that solve their problems. You’ll find opportunities if you bring the people with the problems together with those who make solutions. Facilitation and diplomacy are critical to turning those opportunities into real outcomes. That’s where the staff comes in. But it’s all made possible by getting the right people together in a room and starting the right conversation.

We live in a fascinating time. Technologists, educators—we’re all having trouble keeping up with big changes on so many fronts. It’s a particularly fertile moment to solve problems together. And these are big problems. We’re no longer focused solely on moving a roster or a course design from one system to another (although those are still important). We’re thinking about the value of the data in its own right to help students learn and succeed. We’ve barely scratched the surface of that potential, particularly at the scale that 1EdTech can influence.

For the last decade of my career, I’ve tried various ways to bridge the gaps between people who own educational problems, research educational improvements, and build educational solutions. Often, I’ve done this as a consultant, acting as a marriage counselor between product suppliers and educational institutions. Sometimes, it was through the Empirical Educator Project, which tried to bring researchers with provably effective methods for helping students into the conversation.

I love this work. The first EEP conference, hosted in 2018 at Stanford, succeeded beyond my wildest hope. I honestly had no idea what would happen if I simply brought together people who didn’t normally talk to each other and fostered conversations about collaborative problem-solving. Here are some of their unscripted reactions:

Magic.

We had a spectacular follow-up, twice the size, at Carnegie Mellon in 2019. The university announced its huge Open Simon learning engineering software contribution at the summit. And then…COVID.

I did what I could. I ran Blursday Socials to keep people engaged. I tried my hand at co-founding an EEP-fostered start-up (with none other than Curtiss Barnes). I ran a virtual conference on Engageli. I’m running the ALDA workshop series. And, of course, I consulted.

But at the end of the day, I’ve mostly been just a guy with a blog. As I recently told a friend, I’ve spent my career looking for a large enough lever to move the world. I found a big pole, but I lacked a fulcrum until now. EEP will be vastly more impactful as a part of a larger organization.

1EdTech is an amazing organization. I am privileged just to be on the team. As my tribe says, “Dayenu.” It would have been enough. Having the opportunity to bring my own contribution—honoring the legacy of the folks named in this post and many, many others—is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

How it will all work together is yet to be determined. In my new role, I’m no longer just that guy with that blog. I’m part of a team trying to accomplish many ambitious things simultaneously. We’ll figure it out together.

That means you, too. If you’re an e-Literate reader, then you’ve probably been benefiting from 1EdTech whether you knew it or not. Merging EEP into 1EdTech signals that the organization is working on new ways to include more people in the collaboration. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Let’s create the future together.