Internationalization Work Group 2020-02-04

Owned by Eric Jansson
Last updated: Feb 07, 2020
4 min read

Participants

Chris Moffat
Eric Jansson
Don Hutchings
Ed Comer
Stephen Fuqua
Gene Garcia
Linda Feng
German Freiwald
Emil Marunde

Materials

Education Organization Models

  • Visio 
  • PDF 

Note that in the PDF the order of diagrams is:

  • Ed-Fi current
  • EDU CDM (MSDF presentation)
  • OneRoster
  • FHIR
  • Proposed

Person Models

  • Visio
  • PDF

Notes

General Items

  • In Person Meeting - Looks like it may be around the Ed-Fi Technical Congress
  • Need to review Don's Analysis of Assessment Domain - will most likely be next meeting

Discussion - EdOrg Model

Q: Do we have an example of a School within a School?
A: More theoretical. Might be better to conceptualize School as the end of the hierarchy. So the Admin EdOrgs allows for a depth of hierarchy and then you can rely on School as the end of the stack. Also, often at lower levels the modeling is in terms of buildings and departments.

ToDo:  remove the self-reference from School.

Q: diving into the higher education. Is Ed-Fi considering higher education or focusing on K12?
A: Generally looking primarily at primary and secondary education. There are aspirations to integrate those systems but not the focus.

Q: Is the idea to allow the School to have a set of attributes that are different from an Admin EdOrg?
A: Yes.

  • The nice thing about any of the three options is Schools can be linked to any Admin EdOrg at any level. The structure supports this but would this be effective in practice? Example: Like Schools should only be linked to an LEA or SEA? How do we enforce this relationship?
  • Normative rules would most likely be defined by the geography. So the implementation can set what those best practices should be.
  • Mapping between other standards and this seem doable. The Type would define if it goes to Admin EdOrg or School. The nice thing about breaking out School is you can limit enrollment relationships between the entities you expect.
  • Yes. This is nice to have a reason to break these apart. So this helps to form this domain-specific model. In EDU API, came to the same conclusion of enrollment of a student to a course or program should be treated differently than a membership in an administrative organization. So it makes sense to treat them separately.
  • Worth dropping the School within a School reference. Would be an over-design and could complicate things.
  • Having School broken out for enrollment and instructional things tied to schools. So this helps referential integrity. With respect to the hierarchy, domestically I've seen schools do this (school within a school) to represent programs. In the SIS, there is not a strong representation of programs with alignment of students within programs so they would make schools within schools.
  • The chasm between K-12 and higher ed is one of the most critical problems the education space faces. It is hard to get information across that chasm (e.g., from K-12 to community college, which is where half of postsecondary students go). Today, a community college starts with a blank slate and (relatedly) student persistence rates are abysmal. I would love to see us make an impact on connecting K-12 and community colleges FWIW. Note that smaller districts (aka most districts) also struggle to provide AP course material themselves and so must rely on dual enrollment with their local community college to fill that void (another K-20 challenge). Just some reasons to think beyond the K-12 silo!
  • Yes. The relationship between schools and community colleges is growing much stronger. Very US-centric point around community college. But to and through higher ed probably applies internationally. 
  • Agreement:. There is evidence that this is becoming a need without the market directly asking for it.


Discussion - Person Models

  • Religion is something tracked internationally largely for calendars. So these attributes should be included.
  • Name and name-parts attribute should be added 

Q: Is there an ISO standard for Person entity?
A: Hadn't looked into that yet but could try to find out. What has been done with name and name-parts, she can share out that information.

  • PersonRelationship is to allow contextual person relationships outside of guardian. This model is very similar to where Ed-Fi is today. But gives more flexibility around creating new people-roles and to have more generic relationships.

Q: International Address is different from Address. This has been traditionally hard to manage. What was the thought process behind that?
A:  Initially it ends up that semantics of address in the US is pretty well defined as far as address-parts. International addresses vary more and so attributes of international address tend to be more generic. So splitting these was because the US version was more standardized.
Q: Would address-parts apply here?
A: Yes, seen this done with address parts. Also seen "give up" and just say Line 1, Line 2, etc.. Can look into different models for this group to consider.

  • When it comes to students, one thing that everyone wants to know is their affiliation. What is there current status? Like lottery that has charter students in the system before they are enrolled. Or students that have completed the program but the records are still in the system. So where should person "Status" be tracked in how the relate to Orgs that is not necessarily an enrollment?
  • Ed-Fi has a long history with this question. In general, these statuses are best captured as relationships to the education organizations. So you have an enrollment and the enrollment is active. But it is a constant effort within the ecosystem to just put statuses on people. We've mostly tried to push these onto the EdOrg relationships. You often need them on the associations in addition to the person anyway.
  • Some answers will have to come later when we start looking at the relationship modeling on when we should use those status fields.
  • Some discussion around dates versus statuses as well.
  • The reason for ambiguity around the two relationship associations, was to allow for systems that have a person concept and to accommodate systems that do not have a person concept.
  • The one to many versus one to one. Wouldn't duplicates be in the affiliation to an EdOrg?
  • Yes, but it allows for multiple identification systems. Part of this is wrapped around in the identities. So if we can find a solution to that, then we can go one to one.
  •  We are dealing with this by pulling out the PersonIdentifier. So there are not multiple student records and instead just allow for multiple identifiers.
  • Can use national id's for some deployments for people