Interoperability and Integration

Enable seamless integration with existing educational systems and tools used by public higher education institutions.

Why: Today, higher education institutions already employ numerous digital tools to serve levels in their hierarchy of needs. Due to the need to embed in their existing processes and workflows, interoperability has become critical to successfully build on top of such foundational systems (LMS, SIS, etc.). Moreover, administrators and educators are growing increasingly frustrated with their experiences of migrating between tools that lack interoperability and data exporting/importing capabilities. Additionally, interoperable systems actually enable external data-driven decision-making, allowing educators and administrators to gain holistic insights into student performance, engagement, and other pedagogical metrics. Interoperability enhances the product's future-proofing, making it adaptable to evolving tech environments and keeping it relevant as other tools and systems advance.

Maturity levels

  1. None: No integration with foundation systems causes significant overhead in adoption, decreasing your customer retention and thereby revenue. No interoperability decreases your value proposition, as users cannot export data for external processing to create additional value. Lack of interoperability will also eventually come around, hurting your reputation when your first customer churns but cannot migrate their content.

  2. Junior: Design for integration/interoperability first and set a roadmap to develop this. When setting out your software architecture, choose client-server architecture with a RESTful API as backend. This will lower the threshold to the creation of a public API later down the line.

  3. Medior: Basic integrations with your respective foundation system (e.g. LMS, through LTI 1.3). Allow exporting of mission-critical data via industry-standard formats like CSV for generic data or QTI for questions.

  4. Senior: Full industry standard integration with your respective foundation system. An API, for “sibling” and “child” level players. Export capability of all essential data in e.g. CSV.

Relevant standards

  • LTI 1.3 (Learning Tools Interoperability)

  • IMS Question & Test Interoperability (QTI)

  • xAPI (Experience API)

  • REST API

  • CSV export