Overview

This document outlines the principles & practices around vendor- and product-specific content for the Academy.

The Ed-Fi Alliance is staunchly vendor-neutral in word and deed. Accordingly, Ed-Fi Alliance publications actively avoid mention of specific vendor solutions, instead preferring general descriptions such as "Ed-Fi Certified SIS," and "assessment system."

The Ed-Fi Academy necessarily takes a different approach. The Academy must provide practical guidance, hands-on lab exercises, and other learning content where specifics are required.

Details

Principles

Follow the general Alliance approach where possible — and speak to classes of systems, not specific products.

However, when we do make vendor- or product-specific content:

• Prefer open-source or community-led products over commercial products.
• Prefer products from active Ed-Fi Community members and contributors.
• When we can't avoid using commercial products as an example, prefer Ed-Fi Certified products.
• When we use a specific product, let the Academy student know that we're using one specific option for this content, but other options exist.
  • If the content or course is premised on a specific technology (e.g., "Connecting PowerSchool to the Ed-Fi Platform"), only a brief mention is needed.
• When using a specific commercial product, name-check other product options or offerings.
  • For example, if we use a commercial SIS platform throughout a lengthy general course about integration, we would want to name-check other Ed-Fi Certified SISs.
• Where practical, rotate through product options.
  • If we've created a lengthy course using a commercial product as a practical example, consider using a different product for the next course of equivalent size.
  • This rotation happens "naturally" for some content (e.g., cloud providers). But, be deliberate about it where a "natural" rotation doesn't exist.
• But don't make it weird.
  • Keep the options discussion proportionate to the enclosing content.
    • For example, if a commercial product is shown briefly and incidentally in the context of a brief video, one wouldn't expect a digression to speak about a lengthy list of options.
  • Also, and we assume "duh" here, but this applies to products related to the Ed-Fi Community, K-12 EdTech, and related; we don't need to rotate through, say, cURL and Postman in the same manner.

Example Phrases

• "In this walkthrough, we're using [ e.g., PowerSchool SIS ], but the setup will be similar for other Ed-Fi Certified SIS products. See the link in the Resources section for a list of Ed-Fi Certified products…"
• "As you know, the Ed-Fi Platform can be used on the major cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. For this lab, we'll be using [ e.g., Google Cloud ], and we recommend you do the same so you can follow along with the exercises..."