Participation
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The meeting is scheduled at 2019-09-29 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm CT. Hilton Austin Hotel, Room 408
Agenda/Meeting Minutes:
- Terms of the Ed-Fi Community Intellectual Property Disclosure Policy
- Tech Evaluation Overview: Technology Landscape, what is available now
- Ed-Fi Dashboard Overview: Pros and Cons
- Roadmap goals
- Questions
- Next Steps
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- Anonymous Recommendations:
- Focus on building a service that can provide standardized data set that can be used by Industry-standard visualization tools such as Tableau or PowerBI
- The ODS uses an entity-relationship model which is not always efficient for analytics. Consider creating a standard star schema using FACTS & dimensions with data extracted from the ODS
- Consider creating a metric catalog that pre-calculates and stores metrics from the ODS
- Anonymous Recommendations: Abstraction/Middle-tier, let use (implementations) decide the output.
- Anonymous Recommendations: Rename Dashboards - Data-Informed Visualization
- Move to Open source
- Raj - ESP Solutions: My vote for Responsive UI as a priority.
- The usage of the dashboards is going to go up drastically with this improvement
- Nonetheless, adding a layer of abstraction is a very important, and significant point towards maintainability.
- Kimiko R - ESP Solutions: Modularization of Ed-Fi Core components to support the maintenance of current Ed-Fi visualizations while also allowing a gradual move of use of other available visualizations. )
- Anonymous Recommendations: Analytics Middle tier should be not only a set of views but should also have its own data structure similar to the DDS. Then it would be possible to store a history of facts and also be useful to create custom visualizations.
- Anonymous Recommendations:
- A common middle tier should build on the analytics middle-tier project
- Simplify existing metrics so they are not separately defined for classroom, school & district
- Keep technology simple: SQL, Simple API (Security), Client vueJS or React, chart library
- Open-source technologies
- Chris Sprague - Eduphoric: New Middle Tier
- Foundational "views" a la Stephen's star schema:
- Should not break on standard change.
- Should use only standard SQL
- Should include row-level security columns like Lea, school, section, student.
- Responsive???
- Question whether new dashboards should be use-case specific rather than the kitchen sink?
- User-space "views" that are community contributed and are solution or use-case specific. However, they follow conventions for:
- Versioning
- State
- Maintain row-level security relationship
- Ideally an exchange
- With UI on top of foundational views
- Old Dashboards
- Responsive???
- Question whether new dashboards should be use case-specific rather than kitchen sin
- Happy Miller - Rio Rancho Public Schools NM: There is a real need for plug-and-play, low-o-no-cost way o display data for small and mid-sized districts. This sound like it is a ways off but hopefully, actions taken now can lead in that direction. If not, or actually in combination with; we need to continue working on data out strategies and get vendors like Illuminate willing to ingest the data to feed visualizations there.
- Erin - Los Alamos Public Schools: I'm from a small district with little technical know-how programming-wise. It would be great to have a basic visualization package to view some data in the ODS. Or instructions for how to work with Google Data Studio or R or something free. I love the idea of a university partnership but what research says and what principals/teachers use can be very different.
- Carolynn Fallon - Volusia County Schools:
- Analytics Middle Tier (AMT)
- Community Assistance
- If .NET, then responsiveness and connection to AMT.
- If Community, then grants/support for the community to provide solutions.
- In my opinion, every district/state will have a different skillset available in their region. Some will do MS.NET, others PostgreSQL , tableau and others Azure stack w/PowerBI. My hope is that the eventual 5-year direction will be able to get the community to the point to do machine learning/predictive analytics. I think the community is the key but we just might need some help to start.
- Jeremy - ESP Solutions: In support of Kimiko's & Glyn's ideas on the future. I will say that one of the biggest fears I sense (hear) from districts is "is this ANOTHER software/solution that will disappear in a year or two". People are pretty apprehensive to trust the longevity of Ed-Tech solutions so I think all of us having the same idea of the future plan will help buy-in at all levels. - Jeremy ESP Solutions
David Hefley - Nebraska Dept of Education: During our discussion, it occurred to me that a lot of the issues that were brought up came down to solving immediate problems. The issue of ADA/508 compliance, dashboard modernization to responsiveness, and even if it should be called a "dashboard" all centered around concerns with usability issues of the present. While these are certainly important and should be addressed, any effort and capital spent on solving them will only be temporary and require a future outlay of hours and dollars.
For example, if we address the ADA issue by imposing a minimum compliance to the WCAG AA standards, those will only last until the community decides they want WCAG AAA standards (or the federal government mandates it or some other standard) or if we make the dashboard responsive for today's devices, what happens when the next display style comes along that requires another refactoring of the code (smartwatches, 3D, VR?). This is only compounded by any issues there might be with the tight integration (i.e. the lack of separation) between the dashboard and the data behind it. Ultimately, it is just kicking the can down the road for a future working group to solve!
On the flip side, investing time and money into inserting an abstraction layer that makes the data easier to both retrieve and conceptualize and (hopefully) also removes any specific technology requirements (i.e. it is written in XYZ language), will ensure that a more vibrant ecosystem around reporting and visualizations can be sustained. Schools, districts, state agencies, etc all have access to different knowledge bases, so anything that promotes the ability to use existing technology and knowledge will go a long way to reducing the burden placed on those institutions to implement a new solution. Although it is much easier to point to a pretty visualization and explain how that helps, it is much harder to get people excited about this foundational element. However, by building this model it could allow an open-source library of visualizations to be created and shared. At that point, visualization plugins/modules could/would be created both by the community at large and through a variety of other providers. Ideally, then, any "dashboard" that gets created would be more a factor of picking which widgets to include to meet your needs and could vary depending on your role(administrator vs teacher, for example). This, then, leads to a much more flexible and agile solution that can continue to evolve over time with less lost effort.
An abstraction layer would also set the standard so that entities would not fear investment in implementation since they would know that no matter the changes to the underlying infrastructure, their hours and dollars would still be viable and not need to refactor code for the new releases. Of course, I think a lot of thought needs to be put in around versioning of this to ensure a smooth transition up through versions, but that is fairly standard practice.
So, basically, I'm all for the middle tier architecture and think time and effort are better invested there since it will ultimately make all other visualization outcomes more flexible, easier to implement, and sustainable.- Michael Minuto - MSDF
Gliffy name RVWG - Architecture approach proposal notes pagePin 2
Next Steps:
- Review working session notes and send your feedback if you didn't do so during the working session.
- Welcome new members - Itzel Torres to schedule onboarding session
- Itzel Torres will send out a new meeting time survey for general and subgroup sessions now that we have new members.
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