Unizin and IMS Global Learning Consortium are excited to announce a partnership aimed at driving Caliper adoption. IMS Global is leading the charge when it comes to enabling the collection and exchange of click-stream data across multiple platforms, thus enabling institutions to improve the learning experience through valuable insights. Unizin and IMS Global are aligned in their goals to provide a vibrant digital teaching and learning ecosystem by promoting adoption of standards, like Caliper Analytics.
Unizin is uniquely situated to help IMS Global advance methods and practices for driving standards development. Schools don’t need standards to produce an innovative teaching and learning practice. They do need standards to produce an innovative teaching and learning ecosystem. And they do need standards to promote teaching and learning practices that are sustainable and scalable. Unizin can help speed up adoption of the Caliper Analytics standard by Unizin Member institutions. Making standards work for the academy at scale is core to the IMS Global and Unizin missions.
By working together at IMS Global quarterly meetings and the annual national meeting, as well as several working group calls, Unizin and IMS Global will collaborate on developing a Simple Content Use Metric Profile to define the way data is shared using Caliper. This profile will provide a standardized template for each type of learning event, down to the most basic user interactions with course materials.
Unizin’s eText reader and digital content platform, Engage, will be one of the first applications to use Caliper once it is IMS certified. This addition will make it easy for schools to track the lifecycle of content used in teaching and learning. Faculty can gain insights into the course as it is happening, instructional designers can see interactions with the content as they are designing, students can get feedback on content use and administrators can view broad content utilization analysis to control costs.
Unizin and IMS Global will work to collect digital resource event metrics using Engage and the IMS Caliper framework, thus extending LTI®, Learning Information Services (LIS), and QTI® standards. Unizin is committed to requiring that all measurable components of the ecosystem supply Caliper events to relay event data to Unizin and member analytics systems. These include the Learning Platform (Canvas), multimedia systems, learning content/resources, Student Information Systems, etc.
IMS Global can benefit from feedback from the ‘boots on the ground’ faculty and staff at Unizin Member schools. These groups can provide IMS Global with real-world Caliper applications and validated metric profiles from many of Unizin’s R1 Member institutions. In turn, Unizin will be able to offer flexibility and autonomy to Members, and provide a community forum for assessing and using the Caliper standard in the Unizin ecosystem.
Our two respected organizations are looking forward to promoting and advancing the Caliper standard. By working with the community of practice intended to benefit from the infrastructure capabilities, Unizin and IMS Global enable a development practice tied to real-world value.
Additional details about Caliper can be found here.