The world is on the cusp of a major transformation in educational software and content.  A combination of factors are leading to new models and markets. Those who take advantage of these new markets first are likely to have a significant advantage. At the heart of this development are open specifications.

Educational technology is still relatively young and is evolving rapidly. In the early days of audio, you had to by music content and the device to play it on from the same manufacturer.  As that industry evolved, standards created a new market based on the fact that you could buy music in a standard format that could play on equipment from more than one manufacturer. We’re at a similar stage in educational systems and content. In the near future you should be able to use any number of software tools with content from many different sources. Other advances in audio provided a method of plugging components together in a standard way that allowed consumers to buy different vendor’s products knowing that they could be plugged together. This dramatically altered and expanded the audio market. Specifications, such as the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs) are emerging, which hold the promise of creating standard software plugs.  This has the potential to create a market comprised of a large selection of educational software that are known to plug together and interoperate. This will have huge implications for both consumers and providers of educational tools and content.

If this happens it could lead to a rapid transformation due to the network effect. Once a critical mass of software works this way there will be a customer expectation that everything should just work. This should lead to several other trends as it has in other industries. Once best of breed solutions can be plugged together easily by the consumer, many specialized tools will be developed to tackle specific areas. For example, in the area of content tools we’re starting to see specialized tools for searching, cataloging, or concept maps that work with many content repositories.

Our largest obstacles to progress in establishing this new market is not having a shared vision, which is communicated clearly to the wide spectrum of stakeholders. Many ideas, terms and concepts get confused and lead people to the conclusion that it’s a very complicated picture and a solution will be years away.

One example of this is around the word “open”. There are at least three ways we are using this term:  There is “open source”, which means that everyone has access to the source code and is free to adapt it; there is “open content”, which means content that can be freely shared due to it’s licensing; and there are “open specifications”, which are shared specifications that have evolved through a community effort and are not controlled by one vendor.

We can expect both open source and open content to exist, but not exclusively. Any strategy that works only with these solutions could limit its wider application. Openpromise of creating standard softwa specifications on the other hand, define a meeting place and are needed to bring all the technologies and content together so that open source and vended solutions can work together. Instead of asking questions about how much open source to use, an enterprise would be better off asking what the percentage of packaged versus custom software was in their organization. Only through the further adoption of good open specifications can we actually have more packaged software that works together, whether it is vended or open.

Another of the principal obstacles is the general trend to look for a silver bullet; one technology or idea that would solve the interoperability problem. In reality this is such a complex area that many things will have to contribute to the solution. For example, to use my hairdryer in another country, I need both the electrical characteristics and the plug shape agreed. So in the educational technology; service interface definitions, data structures and communication protocols will all be used together to achieve the end goal of interoperability

Therefore it is important to continue work in all areas of specification development and adoption. In particular there are many data structures that particular domains might develop structures that accelerate the automation and process of producing content for education to allow for interoperability at an even greater level. For example, getting agreement on vocabularies, schemas and ontologies in particular communities is a particularly helpful step towards interoperability. Some goals for the coming period might be those that accelerate the market evolution
based on open specifications.  For example:

• Fund projects that have multiple partners, ideally both open source and commercial, and that interoperate only through the use of open specifications to perform some worthy educational goal.

• Create communities in particular domains to advance common ideas, requirements, and profiles of specifications.

• Support and promote all varieties of open specifications