Agenda

1. SEA Implementation fidelityFidelity
2. GAT meetings Meetings and membershipMembership
3. Ed-Fi 2022 planning prioritiesPlanning Priorities
4. Show & Tell – Success Stories from the Trenches

Refer to the PPT (which can be found here) for additional details on the meeting minutes and discussions.

...

• Troy Wheeler (Ex Officio)
• Chris Moffatt (GAT Chair)
• Maureen Wentworth (Ed-Fi Product Management)
• Rosh Dhanawade, Indiana University/INsite (Reporting & Visualization WG)
• Doug Quinton, PowerSchool (Technical Advisory GroupMonica Hogan, Boston Public Schools (Special Ed WG)
• Debbie Dailey, Indiana Department of Education (SEA WG)Jennifer Downey, Infinite Campus
• John Raub, Wisconsin Department of Instruction
• Noah Bookman, CA Core Districts (Collaboratives Work Group)
• Doug Quinton, PowerSchool (Technical Advisory Group)
• Happy Miller, Rio Rancho Public SchoolsMonica Hogan, Boston Public Schools (Special Ed WG)
• Jennifer Sauro, Infinite Campus
• John Raub, Wisconsin Department of Instruction

Non-Members:

• Sayee Srinivasan (Solutions Architect, SEA)

...

• Nancy Wilson

Meeting Minutes

Agenda Item #1:

...

Caroline Kazmierski provided information on the Ed-Fi Summit which will be a combined virtual and in-person event held at the Hyatt Regency Austin on November 15 to18, 2021. GAT members were provided with a GAT registration code.

The timeline is:

• Wednesday, August 25 - Summit Registration Site Live, general schedule-at-a-glance
• Tuesday, August 31 - Session Presenters Notified of Accepted or Rejected Submissions
• September 1 - Summit Agenda Live on Registration Site
• September 22 - Keynote Speakers Announced
• September 30 - Early Bird Pricing Ends
• October 25 - Hotel Room Block Cut Off Date
• November 8 - Final Day to Register
• November 15-18 - Summit 2021

The planning has included Covid 19 safety protocols and environment considerations, for example, indoor meeting rooms will be at half capacity to allow for social distancing. The agenda is being finalized after receiving 76 proposals from the Ed-Fi Community.

The keynote will be delivered by Dr. Daryl Adams, a recognized education and technology leader, former superintendent, and teacher of the year. He is well-known for innovation with “Leave No Child Offline” and “Wi-Fi on Wheels”.

Agenda Item #2: Gathering input on priorities from GAT members

GAT members shared their priorities and pain points with the new school year starting. 

• INsite
  • Resource management at district with different business purpose and different skill sets that need to be maintained – are SEAs in same conversations with managing state work flows re Ed-Fi and using same people to populate ad maintain local ODS? What can we do within Ed-Fi Community to alleviate the LEA challenges – for example most LEAs have no contingency plan to transfer information within LEA with staff turnovers.
• Ed Analytics
  • Gap in LEA capabilities and vendor turnover are pain points. Over 100 using Ed-Fi by end of year with our hosting instances in SC, and parts of CA and CO. Extend certification process to include other data such as report cards. Need more assessment vendors with certified API as well as Alliance assistance in discussing ODS vs API. Huge priorities with talent acquisition and development.
  • Challenge with more vendors coming onboard with LEAs and SEAs and all setting up differently. How best to integrate existing vendors with new vendors?
• Texas
  • Large SEA working on Ed-Fi TPDM implementation for 125 Education Prep Programs. Huge change management issue with shifting infrastructure for SEA, vendors, Prep Programs. Collecting stakeholder input on dashboards and updating Ed-Fi version.
• Indiana
  • 2021 was year one Ed-Fi for calendar and attendance data sets with 200 million attendance records closed out 20-21 school year and have onboarded nearly all schools and vendors. Transitioning to 2022 SY will have 6+ data sets flowing into Ed-Fi and an  additional 10 next June to total 48 end points for vendors. Finding gaps with some schools such as still using Excel; a real challenge with the way systems used vs. intended use vs. all work arounds. Working on transitioning to 2.4
  • Turnover remains a serious issue especially for tech staff – for vendors as well as with education agencies.
  • **Discussion identified it would be timely to work together and invest in more training materials for vendors and other partners.
• Wisconsin
  • Gone to Azure cloud migration for all of ED-Fi and working on finishing identity and immunization. Other priorities: operational year for actual finance, making student modality decisions, IEP backpack, ACT rostering and outcomes pushed to API in Spring 22 and API 5.2 performance issues. The pupil count membership redevelopment in Wisconsin is planning on pilot in 22/23 school year. Districts are concerned about data counts being off – a challenge as membership is tied to funding $$. Another state ran into pupil count membership issues and found 2.0 bug with deployment to Azure. 2 SEAs shared their experience going in “small” and having to change to “business critical” with Azure.

Agenda Item #3: Follow-up and deferred agenda items from July meeting

• In answer to a question raised: starter kit badges can be awarded to vendors that are certified.
• Maureen shared several slides on the SEA Modernization Starter Kit, and there is additional information available at Ed-Fi.org, TechDocs

Image Removed

...

• Harness Multiple Measures of Assessment
• Ensure Equitable Access for Students

...

SEA Implementation Fidelity

Introducing and discussing the proposed approaches for tackling improved fidelity of SEA implementations that have been synthesized out of Ed-Fi staff and then SEA workgroup discussions.

• The Challenge: Variations in SEA implementations – both extensions and business logic – result in increased cost for vendor integrations and diminished reusability for LEA use cases.
• Proposed approach
  • SEA Workgroup: continue convening the SEA workgroup to address emerging use case needs and determining a common ask new requirements (i.e., Digital Equity)
  • Peer Review: With support and leadership of the SEA Work Group, states will publish data specs for peer review ahead of release to their vendors. 
  • Study Group: The Alliance will convene SEA and SIS vendor representatives in a neutral and supportive format to identifying and tackle implementation fidelity issues 

GAT feedback:

• Establish peer review; could have RFC timeline Oct to Dec for comments from other SEAs before releasing specs to vendors.
• Review lessons learning from Ed-Fi support approach for Texas, a state where every district has their own format making it difficult to create the right extensions (group effort with Sayee).
• Be cognizant of time expectations/challenges – some may not have time to commit to supporting other states.
• While documentation from various states is different, suggestion/request has been made to update swagger definitions for elements – makes swagger environment tools better for everybody; helps vendors understand what is being asked.
• WI went to use case approach with JSON and trying to get it standardized in confluence; may be an opportunity for states to come to agreement on best practices for documentation format.
• More and more on state side their business logic requirements are being maintained separately rather than the implementation documentation; need a consistent format across states. This will be discussed in the SEA work group and want the vendor input as well.
• Should also look at data standard documentation that Eric publishes.

Agenda Item #2: GAT Meetings and Membership

GAT members will be meeting over breakfast on Thursday of the November Summit. A poll was conducted in Chat on whether GAT members expect to attend the Summit in person or virtually. Responses were according to current plans (pending agency approval) with 2 virtual and 5 in person.

General discussion of current composition of GAT. Representation considerations include (1) unbalanced in vendor representation (beyond SIS), (2) WG rotations may unbalance agency representations and (3) diversity is a key consideration.

Chris shared the membership rotation chart that shows which members will be rotating off the GAT according to the planned timeline with members on for two years and then rotating off (https://edfi.atlassian.net/wiki/display/GOV/GAT+Membership+Rotation+Process).

The following chart reflects upcoming rotations:

Agenda Item #3: Ed-Fi 2022 Planning Priorities

• Focus on 30 vendors with most market share (focusing in each of the domain areas)
• Continue using starter kits as Ed-Fi on ramp and narrowly focus asks of vendor community
• Training and certifications that are not agency and end-user specific
  • GAT input:
    • Human capital pipeline around technical side
    • Supporting that pipeline development is key to long term sustainability
    • Building out knowledge and capacity base is the way to go – but don’t oversell as there are other considerations for example how to integrate with state knowledge such as laws
• Show and tell of training being launched at the Summit – a more formalized training academy and can build on that – Chris will do for next month
• Where to take certifications beyond SIS and Assessment? Need further discussion.
• What are the most time intensive overhead administrative tasks that districts have that could be potentially solved through interoperability?  In WI it is vaccinations – going from 30 hours to an hour.  
• From SEAs what are your three or five top targets for the next few years? For example, entries related to Covid funding?  Which are your top priorities? Sayee  and Maureen will work to assemble from SEAs in SEA work group and WG reps can then share with GAT.

Agenda Item #4: Show & Tell – Success Stories from the Trenches

• WI  –  2 weeks test from tier to business critical for Azure and import times are decreasing by 50%, seeing big positive changes
  • Meeting Addendum:
    • We executed our move from hosting our Ed-Fi technology stack on-premise (State of WI Data Center) to Azure Cloud July 15th, 2021. As inbound data volume increased in August, we started to see performance issues with API transaction duration and our ETL step that takes data from our single year API ODS databases to our multi-year ODS. We upgraded our SQL database service tier from 'General' to 'Business Critical' (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/service-tiers-general-purpose-business-critical).
    • We are seeing API transactions running at an average of ~70-80 ms down from a maximum of ~800 ms and our single year API ODS to multi-year ODS imports are completing ~300 seconds versus ~600 seconds. Our team is finishing development in our data quality portal to leverage the built-in database replication for read-only tasks to avoid data contention with our ETL processing. 
• IN – clean certifiable records; General assembly enacted new law that if district’s virtual attendance exceeds 50% will get less funding
• SC  –  all but two districts go into full production this week – Ed Analytics

Summary of Action Items:

•  GAT members with any questions about the November Summit should contact Caroline.
•  SEA starter kit webinar/technical walk through is scheduled for Sept. 16 at 2:45 pm ET – contact Maureen for registration informationAt October GAT meeting, Chris will share more information on training being launched at Summit
•  Maureen and Sayee to work on assembling SEA top targets for the next few years and WG reps will share with GAT.

Next meeting:  

...

28 Oct 2021