Social Learning Across Content Logo: Thin white all-cap text in two lines with thin white lines above and below.

What is Social Learning Across Content?

Social Learning Across Content is a coalition of content creators, technology platforms, service providers, schools and stakeholder groups in education that are coming together to provide technical recommendations to enable cross-platform social learning.

Who is involved?

Current members include:

  1. Barnes & Noble Education
  2. DAISY Consortium
  3. EBSCO
  4. Free Ebook Foundation
  5. Gallaudet University
  6. HathiTrust
  7. Hypothesis
  8. Internet Archive
  9. JSTOR
  10. LibreTexts
  11. PowerNotes
  12. Pressbooks/Rebus Foundation
  13. UC Davis Library
  14. Unizin
  15. VitalSource
  16. W. W. Norton & Company

What problem are we solving?

More and more, students and instructors work across diverse digital platforms — a shift that’s only accelerated with the COVID pandemic. Those platforms should enable powerful collaborative experiences, to augment and reinforce in person and remote classrooms, but thus far social tools are limited in availability and uneven in capability. What is needed are effective solutions that are available over any course content no matter where that content resides.

Certainly there are many educational tools that can add extra capabilities or content to the learning management systems (LMS) used at every school. But tools can only operate on the texts that are inside the LMS or available as stored PDFs (Google Drive, MS Teams, Box, etc). And, as it stands now, texts that are delivered via external platforms (e.g., on VitalSource, EBSCO, Proquest, JSTOR, HathiTrust, etc) cannot easily benefit from the features of tools integrated into each LMS.

What will we do?

Coalition members will work together to identify the technical challenges standing in the way of interoperability, and to propose and prototype solutions for those challenges. They’ll also work to ensure that solutions are accessible and remain so as different technologies are brought into contact with different contact platforms. A set of technical recommendations that characterize the solution set will be published, including any recommendations for how existing standards like Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) could be extended if need be.

What are members agreeing to?

The members of the coalition each agree:

  1. That cross-platform social learning over educational content is a goal they share.
  2. To work collaboratively to identify technical recommendations that can inform solutions.
  3. To work towards implementations of those solutions within their own platforms as appropriate.
  4. To be public with their participation.

Who can join?

The coalition is open to any organization that wants to enable powerful, social educational experiences across content platforms, and shares a commitment to user experience and interoperability.

Please join us.

If you’re interested to join please email us at join@slac-coalition.org.