Re: Digital Textbooks and Locally-stored Student and Educational Data

W3C Technical Architecture Group,




In the United States, legislation and legal precedents are on the side of protecting student data (e.g. COPPA, http://www.coppa.org/coppa.htm, http://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/rules/rulemaking-regulatory-reform-proceedings/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule).  Accordingly, there is interest in providing EDM features to students, teachers and school systems without requiring the storage of student data on government or industry servers and without the harvesting of students’ data.




Towards protecting student data and facilitating sound public policy, research is underway into utilizing numerical techniques, computer algebra systems, on databases (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-math/2014May/0008.html).  Similarly, approaches to facilitate students’ collaborative socialization, group studying activities, for students are being explored.







As technology advances, the complexity and sophistication of the data, models and uses of the data and models to advantage the students, teachers and school systems will increase.  There are, for instance, educational data from uses of textbooks, data from interactions with dialogue systems, data from users’ interactions with intelligent tutoring systems and data from users’ interactions with other educational software.


Towards specification processes, providing advanced features with student data privacy, we can, in addition to recommending research funding directions, explore the topics pertaining to education technology in this mailing list or a W3C Working Group or Community Group.  The research into the broader set of deliverables possible with local storage and local computation pertains to informing policy.  Regarding digital textbook personalization, deliverables can be provided without harvesting students’ data.






Interprocess communication between software, including Web browsers on popular mobile computing platforms, is topical to providing other advanced features for digital textbooks, interoperating applications, including applications interoperating with digital textbooks, providing students and teachers with features.




Combinations of document markup, ontology, semantic vocabulary and JavaScript API, as well as component object models describing API that browser software interoperate with, can facilitate locally-stored data, including from multiple applications, multiple digital textbooks and educational software, processed locally to provide features for digital textbooks and applications as per students’ settings.








​Kind regards,




Adam Sobieski