Introduction

The Reporting and Visualizations Work Group (RVWG) is a community work group within the Ed-Fi Governance structure that has been established to propose the future direction for the Alliance’s investment in providing a free toolset  that “lights up” the Ed-Fi Data Standard.

The origins and early success of the Ed-Fi vision and mission are deeply rooted in a free toolset for reporting and visualizations. To demonstrate the value of the Ed-Fi Data Standard, the Alliance and MSDF invested in successive releases of the Ed-Fi Dashboards. This free toolset successfully showcases the value of, and provides context around, what data can look like using the Ed-Fi data standard as the foundation, and has been instrumental in the adoption of Ed-Fi by education agencies.

However, while the Ed-Fi Dashboards excel at “lighting up” the data standard, and offer a clear value proposition to non-technical stakeholders, the current offering is complex and costly to deploy, upgrade and maintain, has an aging code base, and has low utilization in the current ecosystem.  This has lead the Alliance to consider whether or not to adjust their investment and strategy in this aspect of the Ed-Fi solution.

Through its governance process, the Alliance has affirmed that continued investment in a toolset that “lights up” the data standard, and is made available to the community for free as part of Ed-Fi Core, is important to deliver on two key strategic goals:

(a)    Demonstrate the Ed-Fi value proposition to stakeholders outside of IT departments.

(b)    Provide an “equity” option for education agencies that do not have either budget or technical resources to buy or develop an Ed-Fi-based reporting tool.