The meeting was held via WebEx from 3 to 4:30 pm CT.
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- Follow up from last meeting
- Community work group reports
- Finance Work Group (Maureen)
- Assessment Work Group (Dean)
- Follow-on discussion: Proposal to decompose of Ed-Fi SIS certification
- Discussion topic: Dashboard destiny
- Discussion topic: Next set of work groups to launch
- Next steps and key dates
Participation
Members:
- Chris Moffatt (Deactivated)
- Tim Casey (Unlicensed)
- Stephen Fedore
- dean.folkers
- Troy Wheeler (Deactivated)
- Maureen Wentworth
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- Satish Pattisapu
Mark Racine
Jami O'Toole (Deactivated) (on vacation)
Meeting Minutes
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Follow up from last meeting
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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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In general, SEA's prefer the options of foundational or separate domains –
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and like the base idea and state anomalies can go on top of base (foundational) certification - and are interested in the Alliance being the trainer in a cross-state, cross-agency context – especially since the Alliance is trying to manage use cases.
Need to keep certification separate from capacity building – capacity building comes before certification – perhaps an API “badge” concept.
Two-way capacity issue – states and vendors both need capacity building
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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.
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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”).
It was noted that if Special Ed or Discipline domains are considered for separate certification, there would be a need to flesh out the domains in more detail (beyond current state reporting focus).
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The GAT response to the Ed-FI SIS certification de-composition proposal – focused on capacity building as an alternative to decomposition – to be drafted by Chris and Eric and circulated amongst the GAT for comment, and then sent to the TAG.
Discussion topic: Dashboard destiny
Context
A report on study of status and options for Ed-Fi Dashboards was presented at the 2017 Summit. The report presented feedback around the dashboard to help inform investments for the dashboard.
TCO, flexibility of metrics were biggest concerns for the dashboard. Plus, the rise of alternative analytics presents other opportunities.
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Four options were presented in the report:
Continue Existing Ed-Fi Product Management Strategy
Transition Product to Ed-Fi Community
Sunset the product
Focus on generating metrics only in future dashboards
The Alliance communicated their intent that the forthcoming Governance process was the venue to make a decision.
Potential options for the next steps within Ed-Fi governance structures are:
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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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