Social Learning Across Content is a New Coalition Launching Today

 From Hypothesis Blog Post by Dan Whaley:

Today we’re announcing a coalition, Social Learning Across Content, of educational content creators, technology platforms, service providers, and stakeholder groups that are coming together in support of cross-platform social learning. Moving forward, this coalition will work together to establish user-friendly, interoperable best practices and solutions to bring social learning to all content.

Who are the Members?

Participating in the launch of the coalition are The DAISY Consortium, EBSCO, The Free Ebook Foundation, Gallaudet University, HathiTrust, Hypothesis, Internet Archive, JSTOR, LibreTexts, W. W. Norton, PowerNotes, Pressbooks, University of California Davis, Unizin, and VitalSource.

More and more, students and instructors work across diverse digital platforms — a shift that’s obviously accelerated with the COVID pandemic. Those platforms should enable powerful collaborative experiences, to augment and reinforce in person and remote classrooms, but thus far social tools are limited in availability and uneven in capability. What is needed are effective solutions that are available over any course content no matter where that content resides.

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What Will it Do?

What is needed is a roadmap for interoperability such that content platforms and tools can work together seamlessly to support high quality social experiences, in situ, wherever students and teachers happen to be.

Coalition members will work together to identify the technical challenges standing in the way of interoperability, and to propose and prototype solutions for those challenges. They’ll also work to ensure that solutions are accessible and remain so as different technologies are brought into contact with different contact platforms. A set of technical recommendations that characterize the solution set will be published, including any recommendations for how existing standards like Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) could be extended if need be.

The members of the coalition each agree:

1. That cross-platform social learning over educational content is a goal they share.
2. To work collaboratively to identify technical recommendations that can inform solutions.
3. To work towards implementations of those solutions within their own platforms as appropriate.
4. To be public with their participation.

Learn More, Including Info About Membership and an Upcoming Convening at iAnnotate 2021 this Friday)

Direct to Social Learning Across Content,

Filed under: EBSCO, News