Nothin' From Nothin' Leaves Nothin'

 

First, I'll get right to the point. Probably a better, more accurate way to say "zero-cost" integration would be "lowest possible cost high quality" integration. Quality means seamless, data-rich, etc. Lowest cost means that the cost may not be zero—but using standards that provide as close as possible to plug-and-play brings the cost down as low as it can go. Why do we care? Cost per integration is the enemy of scale. And we know we need to scale to enable diversity, equity, and personalization in the edtech sector.

 

Second, it is the "zero-time" that is by far the most important of the two goals. Speed and agility are key attributes of commercial user experiences that are woefully behind in the education sector.  Integrations take months, creating a large barrier to timely adoption and the ability to pilot an innovation on time. Zero-time is what leads to the value proposition we call "digital on day one." Students, faculty, administrators not needing to waste time on administering software—and using that time instead for teaching and learning.

 

Third, the cost issue gets to things like business models. How does a supplier recoup the cost of becoming interoperable? Well, the first important attribute of a widely adopted standard needs to be that it saves suppliers money. Rather than having to do many custom integrations, the standard reduces their time and cost on every integration. 1EdTech has many data points from suppliers that this is indeed the case—1EdTech standards save suppliers and institutions typically a factor of at least 100 compared to the custom API approaches that 1EdTech standards replace. Thus the "investment" in implementing 1EdTech standards has a very high return on investment already.  

 

Thus, if a supplier is saying, "I can give you the 1EdTech integration, but it will cost more," then this needs to be investigated. If they mean there is a premium purely for doing an 1EdTech integration versus another approach—then the supplier should be called out on that. Using 1EdTech standards saves them money so they should not be charging more. However, it is a different situation if what the supplier is saying is that there is a step up in functionality, i.e., there is more value to the software because it now implements features that are enabled by the 1EdTech standards. That sort of argument makes sense—customers should consider paying more for greater value.

 

Fourth, what about suppliers that go above and beyond investing extra time and expensive engineering resources in the development of a standard? Some suppliers, for instance, are investing a lot in standards development and implementation. 1EdTech Contributing Member organizations (the logos on this page) are the leaders making the work of 1EdTech possible by paying membership dues. The dedication of the lead organizations on 1EdTech work is indeed nothing less than spectacular, given the fact that so many other organizations will benefit from this work without putting in a similar investment. It seems fair that customers, who derive the primary benefit from all of this, should be willing to recognize that this sort of leadership deserves recognition, perhaps even a premium price. 1EdTech does recognize these organizations and individuals every year with leadership awards at the annual Learning Impact conference. Also, often, the suppliers that are first to implement a highly desired standard are rewarded with more business.  However, some of these suppliers didn't put in the extra work to make the standard happen. They were just smart enough to implement it quickly.  

 

Should there be a premium for a product from a supplier that invested a lot into developing a standard? Again, I would say that it depends on whether the improvement in feature and function is worthy of a price premium. I think it is a good idea for 1EdTech to make the extraordinary investment of suppliers into each standard as it comes out more visible to customers so they can understand and decide. I would love to hear the 1EdTech community's thoughts on this topic.

 

Lastly, back to my attempt at a catchy phrase with "zero-time, zero-cost integration." It still gets across the goal of reducing the time and cost, and there isn't any reason why the piece purely associated with the integration can't be zero-time and can't be zero additional cost per integration. Perhaps a better phrase for what we are trying to do in 1EdTech might be "zero-time high-value integration"—meaning the integration should be instantaneous and should enable teaching and learning impact.

 

Would love to hear people's thoughts on this!