OneRoster is a standard from 1EdTech Consortium (formerly IMS Global Learning Consortium) for sharing class rosters, course materials, and grades between a school’s SIS and edtech applications.

This standard’s goal is to reduce the amount of time and complexity needed to manage course and student roster information. The standard allows roster information to be more accurate and timely, as well as simplifies the onboarding process for school IT administrators.

OneRoster began in 2015 as a reworking of 1EdTech’s LIS standard, which is widely adopted in higher education. 1EdTech saw the need for a standard that would support the exchange of student data between different systems in the K12 space. OneRoster uses a subset of LIS services which allows for additional functionality for the transport of student outcomes and grade books.

The current specification of OneRoster (version 1.1) supports the transfer of 3 types of services:

  • results,
  • resources, and
  • enrollments.

OneRoster 1.1 also supports the modern and widely used OAuth 2.0 security protocol. The specification supports the transfer of data using CSV templates or through system data exchanges using REST API binding.

Transferring data between educational data systems like LMSs and SISs is a key use case that OneRoster solves. OneRoster 1.1 allows assignment data (e.g. the description of the assignment, type of assignment, due date, grade, etc.) to transfer from an LMS (which typically produces and holds this data) to an SIS.

Several rostering solutions, such as ClassLink and Clever, support OneRoster as a method of sharing class rosters and associated data. Both solutions allow administrators to share roster data between different learning platforms by publishing updated CSVs or by enabling the OneRoster API between supported platforms.

Read More on OneRoster

Here are other articles we’ve written on OneRoster to help you on your integration journey:

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