Instead of bloating their products with as many new features as they can develop, vendors are increasingly letting other ed-tech companies do the work for them, opening their systems to outside developers.
an open platform where faculty members are free to browse and embed the tools they want to use -- for example quizzes from Khan Academy, plagiarism detection from Turnitin or a homegrown solution -- regardless of whether they logged into Learn or Sakai, and regardless of whether their system has its own, similar tool.
interoperability standards developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, which enable developers to create tools that work with any learning management system
Instructure may be the furthest along. Last year, the company introduced the educational tool app store EduAppCenter, and this June, it rounded 100 partnerships with developers.
Severance still predicted that the current market will give way to an open ecosystem within five years, but getting there, he said, requires vendors to cooperate where they now compete.