The meeting was held via WebEx from 3 to 4:30 pm CT.
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The GAT continued discussion on the proposal to decompose Ed-FI SIS certification.
There is a concern that decomposition is a slippery slope, that risks diluting the overall process.
Would need to be intentional about what the decomposed certifications mean and communicate this to vendors and the community of users. Otherwise states are left on their on to decide to carve up certification on their own – and the clear preference is to leave certification to the Alliance
Vendors prefer working with the Alliance for certification rather that individual states – this is more effective in driving consistency.
Other options to decomposing are to offer a foundational certification with modules or break the domains out into separate certifications and keep core SIS certification whole.
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Nebraska wants to achieve goal of state reporting, but broader goal is to get interoperability across a broader range of vendors – for example an e-transcript company should not have to be certified across all SIS domains. If only option for certification is everything this could be a barrier.; But concern is whether they can carve out meaningful data boxes.
LEAs seeing more movement away from SIS as the key source of all (most) data and more toward specialized vendors (ELL, SEL, school finance) and Ed-Fi is needed in the architecture to help integrate these systems. Modular certifications could become more important with this movement. Timing of this modular certification is important also – not quite there with decentralized SIS components.
To bring discussion towards actionable recommendations, Chris suggested consideration of (a) breaking out Special Ed and Discipline domain certification from SIS certification (rather than decomposing the SIS certification) (i.e. have other domains be additive once main domain is stable) and (b) offer training/badging to build capacity for vendors and states (which seems to be the bigger need for states and vendors and should come first – “Ed-Fi Ready Badge”).
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The project Unicorn conceivers (Data Whiz group) have come up with Project Mothra, which tracks adoption of Edtech tools, and is something the Alliance should track.
Next steps and key dates
- Maureen Wentworth to schedule Finance Work Group meeting
- Assessment Subgroup meetings to be held week of July 16
- Chris Moffatt (Deactivated) and Eric Jansson to draft response to de-composition proposal - related to capacity building - and circulate to the GAT for comment
- rrozzelle and nwilson to provide update on new Project Unicorn work
- A volunteer is needed to drive creation of the survey/poll for surfacing future use cases and potential work groups - for the Ed-Fi Summit in October.
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