TEx: A revolutionary platform that centers on the learner through long-ranged relationship management

Everyone knows that change is hard.

If change is hard, then transformational change is both hard and painful, as it moves an organization in directions that both stretch and break foundational structures upon which the culture was built.

Today in higher education we work in a bundled system, supported by bundled ‘enterprise’ software that is now being tasked to support each learner... individually. To meet that need, with limited support from incumbent software vendors, campus administrators have had to get creative using solutions outside of their supported enterprise offerings. They are pushed to craft web-based or native mobile apps, as the incumbent enterprise vendors are slow to move, or worse yet, are not supporting these sought after solutions that unbundle the course and term and put the student at the center of the learning. This approach is difficult to maintain and creates strain on every part of the incumbent, underlying systems of record, and the staff that support them.

When a more personalized and unbundled experience is the goal, a platform needs to emerge that places the learner at the center of the experience, and surrounds them with offerings and support from a myriad of providers in a Learning Marketplace. It also needs to have the ability to provide frictionless pathways toward different forms of learning, while supporting the current workflows of incumbent systems of record in the process. While we are at it, let's throw in some emergent technology to track performance and forever change the way we think of securing, accounting, governing, and sharing digital information.

TEx (the Total Educational Experience) is that platform.

Created by the University of Texas System’s innovation institute known as UTx, the TEx platform liberates the learner’s data from incumbent systems into a persistent, progressive profile that provides the learner valuable access, insight, and ownership into their lifelong journey of learning across varied offerings from multiple institutions inside the TEx marketplace. As the learner partakes in the offerings from a partner institution within the TEx marketplace, the progress along that journey is recorded in the learner's profile in TEx, as well as transmitted back to those systems of record, so that workflows are maintained while the organization and its other offerings evolve to this unbundled model. This approach provides the organization an evolutionary path toward new models of educational offerings that are in high demand. It also provides them with the ability to test new technologies, modalities, markets, pedagogies and business models without large investments that would involve complex change management processes at multiple levels of the organization.

The incumbent student information systems in higher education pale in comparison to today's constituent relationship management (CRM) systems that power most other industries. TEx is built on Salesforce, the world's leading CRM system. By utilizing the power of Salesforce's services, TEx has the ability to create personalized journeys for each learner by informing that journey with data from both the learning environment as well as the services that a learner is offered along the way. It also leverages the native social abilities of the Chatter platform to create a social experience that is used in all aspects of the learner’s journey. This approach, which is utilized by many of your favorite brands today, is still foreign to the process of higher education.

The platform also liberates content, assessments and outcomes from the clutches of the Learning Management System (LMS). To support this atomic approach toward learning experience design, the platform has the ability to link with incumbent LMS providers to support the investments made by our campus partners. It also provides the tools to craft modular content and assessments that can be reused in many contexts, and stored in different repositories. The digital rights management of that content is facilitated by TEx's implementation of the Blockchain, called Chainscript™. The Chainscript™ tracks the digital rights and usage of any piece of content created in TEx. This provides a path toward a new publishing ecosystem of learning content that cuts out the publisher and tracks rights and royalties back to the original creator. Each piece of content that is consumed by learners can be rated, providing another metric to value the content with. This new ecosystem of content surfaces to the TEx Authoring System for subject matter experts to use for crafting new experiences.

In this educational session, we will

• Share the lessons we learned from our prototype of TEx at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

• Demonstrate how the use of blockchain technology allows students to own their own data.

• How the TEx platform links with incumbent LMS providers

Participants will learn how to approach technology and software development in a way that puts the student at the center.