Written by: Mike Johnston, Product Manager
It seems like everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days. With the recent growth of AI in education, many are looking to understand how D2L will respond to this new technology and what services will be available to detect AI generated content in learner submissions.
The Importance of Integrations
Sometimes, D2L clients want more than what Brightspace can provide. Providing services to our clients through partnership integrations allows Brightspace to be at the center of the learning ecosystem, and allows tools to provide additional value to users outside of Brightspace’s core competencies. Clients can benefit from D2L Partners to rapidly expand the options available for changing market needs. Integrations allow D2L to provide the value of unique and highly specialized technologies from external learning tools for plagiarism detection, AI detection, and more, without investing the time and money to develop these technologies.
A New Standard to Assist with AI Detection
In partnership with 1Edtech, and as members of the LTI Working Group, D2L is contributing to the development of a new industry standard called Asset Processor to define the workflow of passing content from a platform to a tool for asynchronous processing. An example of this would be the evaluation of plagiarism or AI detection, and returning the result to the platform. Many learners and instructors may already have experience with this workflow, as it is commonly used with D2L partner, Turnitin. When implemented successfully, this standard will define the workflow and framework, eliminating the need for custom integrations between tools and platforms. By establishing this standard for tools and platforms, the cost of implementation and maintenance of these integrations will decline significantly, allowing Brightspace to provide many more options for integrations with a greater number and variety of partners.
This standard has the potential to support many more use cases than just plagiarism or AI detection. Accessibility (remediation for colour contrast, font size), transcription (voice to text, image captioning), linguistic (reading level, rate of speech, tone, grammar, spelling), and more! Any other applications that involve processing a submission for a desired trait would all fit within this standards-based framework.
From 1Edtech on this New Standard
As the latest addition to the Learning Tool Interoperability® (LTI) standards, the Asset Processor service continues 1Edtech's goal of creating a responsive, innovative, and trusted ecosystem. This standard fills a gap in the digital learning ecosystem and brings us one step closer to a fully seamless, interoperable world. While there is still much work to be done before this standard is considered final, we are extremely excited about the opportunities it provides.
From Turnitin on this New Standard
Turnitin is fully committed to a standardized integration with our partners. As a contributing member of the 1EdTech ecosystem, we strive towards a truly interoperable experience for our customers utilizing LTI 1.3. Considering the comparable applicability and flexibility afforded by the Asset Processor standard, we are confident that our integration strategy will be beneficial to both partners and customers. Currently, we are working closely with our LMS partners on the first iteration of Asset Processor and look forward to rolling this out to the benefit of our customer base.
Why a Standards-Based Approach?
A well-implemented, standards-based integration benefits everyone. Standards allow us to empower learner potential and achieve a responsive, innovative and trusted ecosystem.
From a platform perspective, having multiple tools available to partner with encourages competition between tools and allows for many levels of partnerships to be created offering various levels of service to customers. The cost of developing to the industry standard is spread across all potential partnership opportunities reducing the total cost of development per partnership.
From a tool provider perspective, developing to the standard opens up integration opportunities with any other platform supporting the standard. Without a standards-based integration, a tool provider would need to develop custom integrations for each platform. Similar to the platform benefits, the cost of developing to the industry standard is spread across all potential partnership opportunities reducing the total cost of development per partnership.
From a customer perspective, a diverse tool ecosystem allows for more diverse pedagogical needs to be met and encourages higher quality and more reliable services. Tool integrations connect this diverse ecosystem back to the primary learning platform instructors and learners are comfortable in, enhancing the learning moment and improving learning outcomes.
When Will this Standard be Widely Available?
It is too soon to predict when this standards-based integration will be generally available, but by working in partnership with Turnitin (who are underway with their first iteration), we are poised to commence development. Keep an eye on the public roadmap for current information on upcoming releases.