1EdTech Announces the Winners of the 2014 Learning Impact Awards Program

Technology projects from the US and as far away as Spain, Australia, and China selected based on evidence for potential to improve learning impact

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New Orleans, Louisiana – May 12, 2014 – The 1EdTech Consortium (1EdTech GLC) is pleased to announce the winners of our annual worldwide Learning Impact Awards competition.  This year, eight winners were selected, out of 23 innovative technology projects submitted by K-20 institutions and education technology organizations.

Now in its 8th year, the Learning Impact Awards program recognizes the use of technology in context at an educational institution and the results achieved.  Winners are selected by a panel of expert evaluators using a series of rubrics to evaluate eight dimensions for improving teaching and learning impact, including improving access, affordability, and quality of learning. Winners recognized for their outstanding achievement were:

Platinum Medals:

• Degree Compass™ at the Tennessee Board of Regents: Personalized course recommendation tool that uses predictive analytics to guide students’ course selection in a way that enhances the rate of academic success and drives on-time completion of their degree.
• The Content Automation Tool (CAT) – Florida Virtual School: CAT effectively removes the administrative burdens of maintaining multiple internal LMSs, dramatically improves efficiency of internal processes, streamlines Florida Virtual School (FLVS) client use and maintenance of content, and introduces a new recurring revenue model.

Gold Medals:

• Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and McGraw-Hill Education (MHE): MHE and SNHU worked with Blackboard to further the development of v2.2 of the MHE building block to include automated course provisioning and centralized user pairing to remove instructor involvement from the course setup process. Additionally, time on task data is now shared from MHE to Bb, providing SNHU’s advisors with an early warning system.
• Improving Teacher Efficacy and Student Learning One Camera at a Time – SAFARI Montage and Newton County Schools: Using 552 VIEWPath classroom technology systems throughout the district in an effort to improve teaching, learning and safety. The systems were implemented following a pilot program that showed an increase in teacher effectiveness, decreasing student misbehavior by 58%.

Silver Medals:

• SpeakApps at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: An innovative integration of open source tools and materials specifically designed so that language learners can practice their speaking competences in a foreign language online.
• Broadband-Enabled Traineeships in Interactive Design: Lightmare Studios and The Gordon teamed up on a pilot educational model developed for Years 10 and 11 secondary school students to deliver traineeships in an interactive game design.

Bronze Medals:

• DegreeMap at Austin Community College: Application from Civitas Learning allows advisors and students to access and compare academic degree requirements, enabling personalized learning pathways.
• Learning Cell Knowledge Community – Beijing Normal University: Compared with the general online learning systems, Learning Cell Knowledge Community uses semantic ontology technology to organize learning resources that can also be attached with social cognitive network properties.

Medal winners will be recognized in the Annual 1EdTech Learning Impact Research Report as an analysis of the awards to provide practical advice to institutions and school districts on what they should be considering to improve to accountability, access, and affordability.

Also recognized with Learning Impact Awards were the winners of the inaugural Connected Learning App Challenge and the first ever Assessment Certification Challenge to the 1EdTech APIP™ and QTI™ standards.

The following additional projects were selected as finalists in this year’s Learning Impact Awards competition:

• OKMindmap: First HTML5 based web collaborative mind map tool that enables users to create and share knowledge collaboratively and in many different formats.
• The Insights Student Success System at the University of Wisconsin: Moves beyond the traditional data reporting methods in education and utilizes predictive analytics and data modeling to deliver an unprecedented view of learner progress and success.
• Atomic Learning LTI Tool: Enables users to seamlessly search the Atomic Learning library from within their LTI-compliant learning management system, and embed links to videos within their courses.
• Eduthek: An LTI-Based Market Place Solution for Learning Content and Tools that integrates seamlessly with Austria’s leading learning management services, LMS.at and Edumoodle, hereby serving more than 2,000 (out of 6,600) schools in the country.
• mAuthor:  A powerful yet easy to use ePublishing solution designed to help publishers and developers create a wide variety of interactive digital content and immediately publish it for multiple platforms and uses.
• The Included Program at Indiana University-Purdue Fort Wayne: Delivers required course materials of any format to students on the first day of class, helping drive engagement and academic success.
• Adaptive Learning at Delgado Community College: Orion learning modules provide an adaptive learning solution that evaluates and guides student progress towards proficiency by providing appropriate assessments, feedback, and evaluations of progress to students and instructors.
• Knowillage LeaP: Enabling personalized learning in a simplified way by combining student profile, learning objectives, activity, assessment, and mastery information, and using advanced algorithms to guide the learner down a learning path.
• QTIWorks at the University of Glasgow: Enables student technology teachers to deliver formative and summative assessment on a Mathematics module via Moodle.
• Grom Social Education Groups at Florida Virtual School: Utilizing the fun and social construct of Grom Social, teachers achieve a higher engagement level from students while leveraging the native communication channels that are already popular with student’s ages 5-16.
• Sarasota Public Schools and Blackboard: Using Blackboard xpLor to define high-level, district-wide controls that meet the needs of both administrators and instructors alike in making the creation, sharing, and maintenance of content easier than ever before.
• JISC-Funded ceLTIc Project: Provides a shared, hosted instance of WebPA (a peer-assessment tool) integrated with the Learning Management System of 6 partner institutions using the 1EdTech Learning Tool Interoperability specification.
• Sound Infusion: Online music creation platform designed for students to create cross-cultural musical compositions.
• The Connected, Any School, Any Student Project - State of Tasmania: Provides access a single “virtual data centre” hosted in the cloud, allowing schools capacity to adopt online, personalized approaches to curriculum to ensure equity of access to education.
• School District of Pickens County and SAFARI Montage: Building a digital learning platform to effectively support professional development.

About 1EdTech Consortium (1EdTech)
1EdTech is a nonprofit organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment. 1EdTech members are leading suppliers, institutions and government organizations that are enabling the future of education by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. 1EdTech sponsors the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, a global program focused on recognizing the impact of innovative technology on educational access, affordability, and quality while developing the people and ideas that are going to help shape the future of educational technology