EDU6215 Journal #1

Drabkin, R. (2017, May 23). Meet Caliper, the Data Standard That May Help us (Finally) Measure Edtech Efficacy. Retrieved from Edsurge.com.

Summary
IMS Global Learning Consotrium is a non-profit member collaborative inventing the future of educational and learning technology. At an annual conference made up of 500+ educational technologists, there was a very well attended session that covered a new IMS Caliper analytics standard that may help us better measure Edtech Efficacy. The article covers information on this new standard and its implications.

Recommendations

• Caliper enables a deeper level of data sharing
• Because there are so many different types of technology tools, it has been almost impossible to have 1 standard way of sharing data among them. Edtech companies can sign up to use Caliper which offers improved data architecture and ease of use. When a student is using a certain tool, Caliper can collect and share data on students' answers to quizzes, responses on worksheets, views of videos and even the number of clicks on interactive resources - it can even capture the exact start and stop time of each of those activities. Caliper can help teachers see which tools are more engaging for students.
• Other potential uses of Caliper
• Data sharing through Caliper would allow ANY provider to communicate to users which resources are most engaging, or whose usage correlates to improvements in learning outcomes. This would save teachers/districts a LOT of time trying to find the most useful tool for their students.
• What Caliper needs to work
• Like anything else today, Caliper can really only grow and be effective if it is being bought/utilized by companies and schools. The more people that use Caliper, the more data is captured to help understand the power of the many different educational resources.

Reaction
First of all, I had to Google what "IMS" meant (Instructional Management System), before I could fully grasp what the article was about. The Educational Technology area can become very overwhelming. Every day, everywhere you look, someone has created a new technology resource that can be utilized in school. How much time are we supposed to spend trialing each one? How do we know if it is actually working/producing legitimate results from our students? It was really interesting for me to finally to start thinking about the big picture aspects of education technology.