Why Interoperability Standards Matter in K-12 Education Software

What You Need to Know to Make Education Technology Tools Work for You

You’re not alone if you feel like technology is making your job harder instead of easier. As part of our recent 2022 Education Focus Report, we surveyed educators and district leaders on their education technology challenges, and a handful of areas topped the list: 

• Juggling multiple tools for teaching and learning (46%) 
• Lack of parent/guardian involvement or understanding (41%) 
• Lack of time to use technology effectively during the school day (37%) 
• Integrating new edtech tools into the classroom (32%) 
• Implementing new instructional approaches (31%) 

Some of the technology educators use was likely chosen by a well-intentioned team to solve very specific problems in isolation. Our report indicates intentions will continue to lead to implementing new education technology tools for improving assessments, reporting, and data-informed instruction moving forward. 

As an educator, incorporating these tools into your day may be challenging, especially when juggling them all together. You might find you spend most of your time on the basics of just accessing the tools instead of using them effectively to realize the value of those data dashboards that sold the purchasing team on the solution in the first place. 

They are often different products from different companies, so getting them all to work together seems impossible.

But it’s not impossible. In this blog, learn how interoperability standards can more easily make tools talk to each other so you can get critical data insights, personalized engaging activities, and supports to make your job easier instead of harder. 

Glossary 

Before we get started, here are some definitions that may be helpful. 

• Integration: To form, coordinate, or blend into a functioning or unified whole.  
• Interoperability: Computer systems or software’s ability to exchange and use information through a standard format. 
• Standards: Enable the transmission of meaningful information that’s independent of any particular system. 
• 1EdTech: The world’s leading member-based non-profit community partnership of educational providers, state and national education departments, and edtech suppliers working to power learner potential. 
• LTI: The 1EdTech Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) is a standard that prescribes a way to easily and securely connect learning applications and tools with platforms like learning management systems (LMS), portals, and learning object repositories. 
• CASE: The 1EdTech Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange® (CASE®) standard facilitates the exchange of information about learning outcomes, competencies, and skills. 
• TrustEd Apps: A 1EdTech program that helps to build an open, trusted, and innovative digital learning ecosystem at every level. 
• QTI: The 1EdTech standard to format questions and test items for use in multiple delivery platforms.
• OneRoster: A data standard for rostering, course setup, and grade reporting managed by 1EdTech. 
• Ed-Fi Alliance: A non-profit devoted to helping every school district and state achieve data interoperability.

For edtech tools to make your job easier, it’s important first to understand what to ask for. Integrations and standards-based interoperability are not one and the same. A basic integration happens between two software applications, often using custom methods to send data. Each integration is unique, making it difficult to maintain and time-consuming and costly to create. For example, a new tech tool may integrate with your existing software, but in practice, that may mean creating custom fields or new screens that ultimately require slow workarounds and deplete the functionality of the technology.

Because of all the time required to create and maintain traditional software integrations, your school or district may be hesitant to try integrating applications. That’s understandable, but interoperability addresses these problems to make it possible for your certified educational tools to work together.

Standards-based interoperability improves software integrations by using a common method to integrate applications that are repeated for every connection. This makes it easier to support, faster, and more cost-effective to create new integrations. 

For standards-based interoperability to work reliably, it’s vital to ensure an application is certified for the standard. Applications that only “support” a standard may have variations that make them harder to implement and maintain.

Now that you know how standards-based interoperability is better than basic integrations, how can you figure out which standards to ask for? Standards and programs include LTI, Ed-Fi, CASE, and so on. So many different standards are often referred to by acronyms instead of their full names. It can be hard to figure out what they all do, let alone what’s needed to make your classroom technology ecosystem work well for you.

To clarify, there are four main areas where interoperability standards can help make your technology work better together: privacy and security, single sign-on (SSO), easy curriculum access, and data-informed decisions.  

Privacy and Security  

First, any technology being used in the classroom needs a foundation of data privacy and security. Your students and their families trust you, and you need to be able to trust that the technology you use to help them learn will keep their data safe.

The TrustEd Apps data privacy standard from 1EdTech is a simple way to know if an application can be trusted. If a tool is TrustEd App-certified, you know it’s been vetted and can support your data privacy and security protection needs. 

Single Sign-On 

Next, accessing edtech tools should be simple and secure without the hassle of remembering dozens of logins. A couple of standards can be used to make multiple logins a thing of the past. For example, with PowerSchool Schoology Learning, you can make any application that is LTI 1.3 certified available for your class without an additional login.

To make it easier to load your class into Schoology, ask your administrators to use OneRoster through SIS Connect. 

Easy Curriculum Access 

Once you and your students no longer worry about remembering multiple logins, wouldn’t it be amazing to prepare lessons and personalized learning activities more efficiently?

If your district purchases content from a publisher, they should be able to provide you with a Common Cartridge to load that content into your learning management system (LMS) like Schoology Learning.  This allows you to keep the structure of the curriculum, so you don’t have to create multiple Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) links or send your students to the publisher’s platform to navigate on their own.

Test item providers should also be able to provide you with Question & Test Item (QTI) files to load into your assessment tool, such as PowerSchool Performance Matters. And the real power will come as more of the edtech market adopts the Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) for alignments to allow you to quickly find all kinds of materials and assessment items related to an academic standard. This lets you quickly find the right content to meet each student’s needs.  

Data-Informed Decisions 

Finally, whole-child data-informed instruction is nearly impossible with data siloed in different technology tools. Although data-informed instruction and dashboards to determine “return on instruction” are often top priorities for schools and districts, it takes a lot of manual work to load data into an application to generate insights. 

Without interoperability connections, it can be challenging to identify the same learner in every system and the effectiveness of a learning activity that can’t be mapped back to a common learning objective. 

Other specifications like Ed-Fi and SIF are often used for summative or state reporting on student performance and are more likely to be used by your administration team. 

Standards-based interoperability does not provide a one-size fits all solution to the complex educational ecosystem that makes up a modern classroom. Fortunately, you don’t need to become an expert on interoperability for the standards to make the technology parts of your job easier. Each standard solves a specific problem and can be implemented in phases. 1EdTech started the TrustEd Apps pledge to make it easier to identify a network of other K-12 organizations and suppliers that support using these standards. 

If your school or district is a 1EdTech member, your administrators can create a simple dashboard launched from Schoology Learning (add a link to the help doc for how to add the link) to see all the certified apps. You can still look up certified TrustEd Apps from the TrustEd Apps product directory if you don’t have this.

PowerSchool has endorsed the TrustEd Apps Pledge to set the foundation for powering personalized learning at scale.

PowerSchool endorsed the TrustEd Apps Pledge to encourage the adoption of standards-based interoperability because standards set the foundation for powering personalized learning at scale. If we all support the standards to make basic integrations easy and predictable so that accessing the tools you use in your classroom from our platforms becomes seamless, then we can focus more time and energy on creating dynamic, data-informed recommendations that improve your teaching and learning experience to make your job easier.

Effective interoperability can only be achieved when platforms, content publishers, and other classroom tool providers collaborate with educators at all levels to agree on a common language for connecting applications. When an agreement happens, the cost to integrate is reduced, and everyone involved can focus more time and energy on innovation in the classroom. PowerSchool comes together with competitors, customers, and partners in many forums and at multiple levels to advance standards-based interoperability. 

Through 1EdTech, the member-funded and governed organization that brings higher education, K-12, and edtech suppliers together to solve education problems, PowerSchool participates in and leads several product steering committees, work groups, and taskforces.  

• As co-chair of the 1EdTech Digital Curriculum Product Steering Committee, Kristen Morton, a Senior Product Manager at PowerSchool, works with content providers, other platform providers, and both K-12 and higher ed leaders to identify the biggest challenges in the delivery of digital curriculum  
• Marcos Cassel, a Principal Security Engineer with PowerSchool, and Brad Knickle, PowerSchool’s Security Product Manager, offer security and data privacy expertise to the 1EdTech Security and Privacy Committee 
• And I am honored to serve on the 1EdTech Board of Directors and co-chair the CASE Network Committee 
• Several other PowerSchool staff are actively engaged in technical work groups for specifications like CASE and OneRoster, and in early task force work for topics like Identity 

With the Ed-Fi Alliance, an organization dedicated to K-12 district and state data interoperability funded by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, PowerSchool’s Vice President of Student Education Solutions, Ed Dedic, will serve on the Ed-Fi Governance Advisory Team in 2023.

In all these forums, local- and state-level educators are encouraged to bring their voices, priorities, and challenges to the meetings. These conversations need diverse perspectives from people who are not technologists to advance true interoperability vs. integration, and we encourage you to be a part of the conversation.

As an example of how educational entities can get involved with interoperability, Brianna Creed, Assessment Operations Manager, Office of Assessment, Accountability, and Performance Reporting for Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE), explains how Maryland is engaging: “As a state entity, the Maryland State Department of Education values interoperability for large-scale state assessment item development because it enables the seamless transfers of vast item banks between vendors for test administration. Interoperability increases a state’s ability to use multiple vendors in an integrated assessment ecosystem. From a state perspective, this means that we can use different vendors’ products that are a best fit for each task and they cohesively function as a whole. MSDE requires that our assessment vendors develop questions, test items, and item bank technology that conform to the 1 EdTech Question & Test Interoperability (QTI) specification.”

Creed continues, “Additionally, MSDE realizes that, much like the operating system of a computer or mobile device, the real power of digital learning comes when the learning platform, digital instructional materials, state and local assessments, and other learning applications work as one integrated system to support standards-aligned teaching and learning. MSDE has published the Maryland Academic Standards in the Competency & Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) format. MSDE makes the case-formatted standards available through the CASE Network for the procured supplier(s) to use in aligning content with the correct Maryland Academic Standards in support of aligned instruction.”

Together, suppliers and state and local agencies define data privacy and security rubrics that can be used to assess all digital tools used in the classroom so we can be confident the applications with the TrustEd App seal are delivering quality experiences. 

We know we can save administrative and instructional time by continuing to make it easier to roster students and educators into applications from the SIS with OneRoster, and then on to all the classroom tools available from Schoology Learning using LTI.

By solving access problems and addressing data privacy concerns, interoperability can help clear the first two hurdles of digital transformation efforts. By implementing interoperable technology, you are well on your way to being able to focus more time and energy on spending time with students, which is what matters most in the classroom. 

PowerSchool is committed to taking the value of standards-based interoperability even further by adding interoperable academic standards, instructional content, assessment items, educator professional development, and other educational supports to our platforms. We are working to solve data exchange problems so educators can receive predictable, repeatable, and scalable student outcomes data and further maximize the return on instruction. 

Although standards-based interoperability seems like a concept that only a technologist should care about, it solves problems that provide real impact in the classroom.

The use of educational technology is expected to continue to increase in today’s modern classroom. If you are being asked to juggle more tools, ask your administrators how they plan to use OneRoster and LTI to reduce time spent troubleshooting basic access questions. Now that you know the basics of interoperability, look for the TrustEd Apps seal to explain that data privacy concerns are covered with the new tool you want to use with your class. As an innovative educator, power brighter futures on PowerSchool’s certified interoperable platforms. 

About Carrie Vail 

Carrie Vail has over 20 years’ experience developing edtech publishing and platform solutions spanning K-12, higher ed, and corporate training. After 12 years at Pearson creating technologies to support the Higher Ed, International, Professional, and K12 divisions, Carrie moved on to focus her efforts on how video can be fully leveraged for effective instruction and engagement at Viddler. More recently, she returned to K-12 at Schoology to build out curriculum capabilities within the LMS. Now, Carrie is a member of the 1EdTech Board of Directors, representing PowerSchool where she leads product strategy and interoperability for PowerSchool’s Classroom Cloud.