OCT 6, 2006 - IBM believes industry growth and service delivery in education will improve dramatically with the widespread adoption of open technologies – open standards, open source software and open hardware. Open technologies can make it easier and less expensive to retrieve and exchange data critical for sharing educational resources. Open standards and technology models such as service-oriented architecture simplify the process of integrating and customizing systems for interoperability, productivity and easier access to information and services.
IBM is a long-time supporter and advocate of efforts to expand the adoption of open technologies in both K-12 and higher education. Among its many efforts supporting open technologies worldwide, IBM is: a co-sponsor of the K-12 Open Technologies Initiative of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN); a Contributing Member of IMS and member of several IMS working groups; an advocate of the e-Framework Initiative; a commercial affiliate of and contributor to Sakai, a non-profit venture to create open-source course management, collaboration and online research support tools for higher education, and a commercial affiliate of Kuali, a consortium for developing an open system of financial management for higher education institutions. For more information about IBM’s support of open technologies in education, visit
www.ibm.com/education/open.
IMS Global Learning Consortium
The IMS Global Learning Consortium is the leading advocacy group encouraging the growth and impact of learning technology worldwide. IMS is a nonprofit member organization that provides leadership in shaping and growing the learning industry through community development of standards, promotion of high impact innovation, and research into best practices. For information about IMS/GLC, visit
http://www.imsglobal.org/.
"Higher education institutions worldwide are eager to understand how service oriented architectures can be applied to simplify enterprise level application deployment," said Rob Abel, Chief Executive of IMS. "Rice is one of a select group of institutions leading the way in understanding best practices from which many institutions will benefit."
e-Framework for Education and Research Initiative
The e-Framework for Education and Research is an initiative of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Australian Department of Education Science and Training (DEST). The e-Framework currently has as partners: JISC, DEST, the New Zealand Ministry of Education, and the SURF Foundation (the Netherlands). The primary goal of the e-Framework is to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research through improved strategic planning and implementation processes. For more information on the e-Framework visit
http://www.e-framework.org
Professor Neil McLean National Technical Standards Adviser to the Australian Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST): “I welcome this initiative particularly because it provides opportunities for international collaboration. Both the IMS Global Learning Consortium and the e-Framework for Education and Research Initiative will benefit from the work being undertaken at Rice University in terms of understanding SOA implementation issues.” For more information about DEST, visit
http://www.dest.gov.au/
IMS and the e-Framework are working together on a shared vision of service enabled infrastructures for higher education. The IMS Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) working group is evaluating the application of service enabled infrastructures to data exchange between learning systems and student information systems, as well as high impact enterprise services, such as identity management. For more information about the collaboration between IMS and the e-Framework, visit
http://www.imsglobal.org/pressreleases/pr060622.html
