IT Standards

IMS Global Grants First Caliper Analytics Certifications

• By Rhea Kelly
• 10/22/15

IMS Global Learning Consortium today announced nine organizations whose ed tech products have achieved conformance certification to its newly released Caliper Analytics standard. All are IMS Global Contributing Members: Blackboard, D2L, Elsevier, Intellify Learning, Kaltura, Learning Objects, McGraw-Hill Education, University of Michigan and VitalSource Technologies.

Caliper Analytics "enables the collection of high rate real-time event data, via software sensors (or the Sensor API) and information models (known as metric profiles). By establishing a set of common labels for learning activity data, the metric profiles enable the exchange of the data across multiple platforms, which will allow institutions to derive better insights from interaction with digital content, learning tools and platforms. In addition to defined metric profiles, Caliper also supports versatile 'freeform payloads' in order to support existing products, information model innovation and the diverse needs of analytics researchers," according to the consortium. Caliper provides open source code and APIs for rapid implementation of the standard.

"The goal of Caliper Analytics is to reduce the cost of obtaining quality analytics data from digital educational products by orders of magnitude," said Rob Abel, CEO of IMS Global, in a press release. "Just as the adoption of Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) made it radically easier for institutions and faculty to innovate with learning tools and apps, Caliper will revolutionize how institutions holistically assess what is working to move the needle on improving outcomes. We applaud the leadership of the organizations that are the first to adopt and complete conformance certification for Caliper v1.0. We anticipate that many more organizations will soon follow suit as more and more institutions ask for Caliper conformance to enable consistent access to learner data."

"The University of Michigan is proud to have played a leading role in the development of Caliper 1.0, and to be the first institution of higher education to have a service certified as compliant with the specification," said Laura Patterson, associate vice president and chief information officer at the university. "Open standards are critical to our vision of an interoperable and loosely coupled digital learning ecosystem."

"Caliper provides a critical foundation to advance learning analytics; by creating common naming conventions and transport protocols educational institutions and technology providers can provide deeper insights only possible through combining data from multiple platforms," said John Whitmer, platform analytics and educational research director for Blackboard.

Stephen Laster, chief digital officer of McGraw-Hill Education, commented, "Targeted learning analytics can provide institutions and instructors with an incredible set of tools to help improve student outcomes. By removing the interoperability barriers to these insights, Caliper Analytics makes it easier for educators to use data to make teaching and learning more personalized and effective."

The Caliper v1.0 specification can be downloaded from the IMS Global Web site, which also houses a Getting Started Guide, Implementation Guide with code, and Sensor API code in six programming languages.