CNI Spring 2021 Virtual Membership Meeting

In a landscape where ensuring student success is paramount and more and more learning moves online, faculty and institutions are looking for new capabilities that enable students to engage with content together, starting with the books and articles that form the foundation of teaching and learning. Social learning provides proven benefits: making learning active, visible and social while improving outcomes—a need further highlighted by the present COVID crisis. However, these capabilities do not yet extend inside the content platforms where books and articles reside. The IMS LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standard has shown the benefit of interoperability between systems, but has not yet been extended to support interoperability within systems. Without a goal of interoperability, platforms will naturally implement their own unique approaches. However, teachers and students work across diverse platforms on a daily basis and need solutions that can provide uniform experiences. This effort endeavors to unite the major players to avoid proprietary approaches in favor of user-friendly interoperable solutions by bringing together the major educational content and learning platforms, defining the essential elements necessary for interoperability, and making a joint commitment towards these principles.