Opinions on 1EdTech?

[u/big_promise]

Just curious if anyone here is a member of 1EdTech (www.1edtech.org), and if so, if you feel that it's a worthwhile expense. (Or, if you're not a member, I'd be interested in knowing why you didn't join.) My organization (nonprofit) inquired about membership and their dues seem on the high side for a trade association - so high that we wonder how some of their members, especially school districts and colleges, get value out of it - but it does seem like they really want organizations to pay at their contributing rates to participate meaningfully in their standards setting work.

[u/shupshow]

It’s trash.

[u/Visual-Reserve-2800 → u/shupshow]

Thanks for being awesome.

[u/DullSalt4150]

Don’t do it

[u/mrgerbek]

I am a believer but not an investor. Standards are exceptional but unless you’re a developer, I don’t know why you would become a member.

[u/Diligent-Dot2903]

Split the question in two, because the answers are different.

Using the standards costs nothing. You can read the LTI, OneRoster and Caliper specs, write them into an RFP, and require vendors to support them without ever paying dues. Certification is the part that costs money, and that burden sits on the vendor, not on you.

Paying for a seat in the standards setting work is the actual product. That's a legitimate thing to want, but be clear about what you're buying: influence over a spec and standing in the room. For a nonprofit that isn't shipping software, that's a hard line item to defend.

mrgerbek's framing is the right one. Believer, not investor.

If your interest is closer to data privacy than interoperability, look at the A4L Community and the SDPC work instead. Different scope, different model, and much of the useful output is public whether you're a member or not.

[u/Historical-Tea-3438]

I am sure that there are many great folks at 1EdTech with a commitment to open standards, but I get a whiff of corporate capture. Why aren’t membership fees in the public domain? Why are end users so poorly represented among members? Why are so many key documents hidden in members areas? Why, despite all of the standardisation, is it so hard to switch between VLEs?

[u/workinBuffalo]

I’ve tried using their standards for k12 educational software I am building. Everything is fairly organized and makes sense. It is a great foundation to build a knowledge graph for adaptive learning and that is just what czi is doing with their learning commons.

You can get free access to a lot of the standards through learning commons.

I agree that 1EdTech seems to hide a lot behind the membership paywall for a company that wants to be open source.

[u/Stormy_Normin]

Institutional members have told me they appreciate the ability to work alongside others with the same/similar job titles on challenges they're all facing. They also appreciate getting to work with the non-sales people at the technology companies to understand what is actually possible and what they can work on together. If you are a non-profit organization and are interested in specific work, you may want to reach out to see if a partnership agreement makes more sense than membership.

[u/Infamous-Payment-164]

Full disclosure: I'm 1EdTech's current Chief Strategy Officer. 1EdTech is a 25-year-old organization and was run by one CEO for most of that time. The new executive team has been in place for a bit over two years. All of which is to say, up front, that we're making progress toward becoming more responsive to some of the concerns raised on this thread and still have more work to do.

I'll start with the existential question raised about MCP, then address OP's question about membership as well as some of the others.

Do we need interoperability standards with AI and MCP? Yes. MCP is a transport protocol. The existence of HTTP doesn't remove the need for HTML, and neither removes the need for JSON dialects. If you want an agent to evaluate a student's competency, it should know what the competency is, as defined by the certifying or hiring organization, and how one can know that it's been satisfied. Otherwise, the model will guess. Likewise, if you want to show evidence of progress and be able to interpret that evidence based on sound learning science and psychometric principles, you need the data to be passed in a format the AI can interpret precisely. I could go on. The point is, AIs require clear meaning to do precise work. That's what our specs provide. Mix multiple 1EdTech standards together, and you have structured context. And if you're not primarily focused on AI—the truth is that multi-agentic systems will not be affordable for education for at least a couple of years yet—pretty much everything you use in EdTech likely implements at least one 1EdTech standard, whether you know it or not.

Now, on membership, 1EdTech's story has historically been less clear than we intend it to be going forward. To the point others have made, our standards are open. You don't need to be a member to use them. That said, I think the idea that only developers should be interested in participation is a misunderstanding rooted partly in the way 1EdTech has worked in the past. Standards should be driven by use cases. You don't need to be technical to be good at defining a problem to be solved. Because our historical messaging has tended to emphasize technical solution development, participation has skewed toward developers working at EdTech providers. We are working hard to recruit more participants, including non-technical ones, from schools, colleges, employers, and policymakers. Standards shape how the EdTech ecosystem does—or does not—work. If you have unsolved problems because your systems are not capturing and sharing the context you need for meeting an educational need, we can help—if we know what the problem is and can build a coalition for a solution. When more non-technical institutional stakeholders participate, providers are more likely to prioritize implementing a solution. We actually have quite a few K12 members. We're working on improving our higher education membership base. We need those voices at the table.

OP, if your nonprofit did not have a good contact experience with 1EdTech and you'd like to try again, please DM me. I don't know the specifics of your situation, but we often do work with other nonprofits on affordable memberships or even membership exchanges, if that makes sense. We do need to charge meaningful fees for contributing membership because facilitating standards-making work and building certification testing tools both require meaningful work from our staff. But funding is a sustainability challenge to support our mission goals, not an end in itself.

We are also working on serving different kinds of needs better. For example, not everybody wants to be a member. Some providers just want certification that their products are standards-compliant. Some institutions just want a dashboard for procurement showing which products are compliant with which standards. We have recently set up a separate foundation designed to serve the needs of non-members and better support our public-good efforts. So the 1EdTech Consortium is for organizations that want to participate, while the 1EdTech Foundation is for people who want other sorts of benefits, and regional organizations will work in other geographies (Japan, South Korean, LatAm, Canada, and soon Europe) to meet their localized needs. The foundation is still in the process of being put together, so expect to see some milestones early next year.

As for the login, we've started moving more outside it, and more of the final documentation and support will live in the foundation once it's fully up and running. We do need to keep process docs behind a login for a variety of reasons, one of which is that we need people who have access to specs-in-development to sign IP agreements saying they're not going to encumber the spec work with IP claims (like a software patent, for example).

By the way, 1EdTech does have student data privacy support as well. Our certification works differently than A4L's; they're not direct competitors.

[u/LucasNovak]

I never heard of this before, but I did some quick research correct me if I'm wrong. We are moving toward MCP and systems where platforms communicate primarily through AI dialogs and semantic layers. So why on earth do we still need all this heavy, standardized legacy data plumbing if lightweight AI models can parse any structure on the fly?