Internationalization Work Group 2019-12-11

Participants

Eric Jansson
Ed Comer
Craig Jordan
Linda Feng
Gabrielle Garonzik
Don Hutchings
Chris Moffat
German Freiwald
Gene Garcia
Stephen Fuqua
Gabrielle Garonzik

Materials

Notes

Ed-Fi International Spreadsheet - Don Hutchings
Spreadsheet (attached to meeting page in techdocs)
Recommend folks review before the next meeting for a deeper discussion.
Overview of Assessment Domain with Recommendations for Internationalization.

Ed-Fi/IMS Comparison - Linda Feng
Slide deck (attached to meeting page in techdocs)
Overview of IMS, current domains
IMS is currently looking at how to unify these separate domains into a more unified model.
Domain areas are tangential to each other and they are now seeing some overlap.
Historical perspective
Early days model (IMS Enterprise) was very simple with just Person, Group, and Membership entities. Groups handled courses and academic sessions, departments and schools. Membership was used to attach a Person to a Group and assigned Roles. Later a spec to add Services was added.
Model was very was flexible and had international adoption.
In 2009 IMS revamped to Enterprise 2.0. This further defined things that people were doing with the generic entities like Group and Membership by breaking out new entities - Course, Outcomes, and Bulk.
Relationships between the now 6 entities was not enforced in the model - this was put on the implementations to handle. Later, LIS solved some of these problems but created a high bar for implementation. Today, EduAPI is an effort to both unify and simplify the LIS model.
Comparisons with Ed-Fi
This discussion was cut short due to time so it is recommended members go back and review these slides for further discussion.
Person/Roles - Teacher/Student vs. User and Parent vs. Agent
There may be concerns about allowing for individual persons to have multiple roles with the IMS model.
Names - Explicit name fields vs. common vocabulary that can be combined to create a person's name.
The IMS common vocabulary does tend to require greater effort to understand when creating an implementation but in the end is far more flexible.
IMS allows for strings to be in multiple languages
Additional Topics
Addressing terminology and creating a common language. Aliases may be an option to translate the model to a local vocabulary.
Addressing a consistent approach to associating people with an educational offering. Affilations, roles, both? Do all fall under enrollments?

MS EDU CDM - Gene Garcia
Quick review due to time. Recommended members take a closer look before the next meeting.
Overview of the principals Microsoft is trying to follow for EDU CDM.
Open source starting schema.
CDM and data integration and persistence. Included here is a link to the github repos to check out some of the accelerators.
The Healthcare accelerator is an example of how Microsoft has used the fire standards in their core data model and built out in power apps. This is an idea of what they would like to replicate for education.

Action Items
Recommended we create a Slack channel in Ed-Fi-Alliance slack space (this is done). Intended to further conversations around the resources presented between meetings.
From the last meeting, Eric Jansson and Craig Jordan have time set aside to review the fire specs as a point of comparison for an international model.
Overall goal would be to have a bare bones model as our next primary goal that we can then tweak and expand.