Updates to Dashboards

This section provides a summary overview of the major improvements, updates, enhancements, fixes, and changes made in all v1.3.x releases of the Ed-Fi Dashboards. Additional detail can be found in the sections that follow. The Release Notes section of this documentation has a complete list of all changes made since v1.2.

New Dashboard Features

Several features were added to the latest version of the Ed-Fi Dashboards. This section provides a summary of the most significant enhancements.

Dynamic Watch Lists Feature Improvements (New in v1.3.2)

Bug fixes to the Dynamic Watch List  and other Ed-Fi grids, Castle Windsor library updates and some technical clean up tasks. For a full list of fixes please see v1.3.2 Release Notes.

Compatibility with v2.0 ODS (New in v1.3.1)

The Dashboard ETL packages that calculate metrics and populate historical data use an Ed-Fi Operational Data Store as a data source. In Ed-Fi Dashboards v1.3.1, The Dashboard ETL packages were enhanced to support v1.2 of the Ed-Fi ODS and to be forward-compatible with the Ed-Fi ODS / API v2.0. See the Operational Data Store Version Compatibility Approach technical article for an overview, and the Dashboard v1.3.1 Synonym Updates technical article for implementation details.

Dynamic Watch Lists

A Dynamic Watch List feature was created for teachers who wish to view a listing of their students who meet teacher-defined conditions or criteria. It is similar to the standard watch list in that it produces a listing of the students and their information. However, the process of selecting students is different. While the standard watch list is created by the teacher’s explicit selection of students to put onto the list, the Dynamic Watch List is created as a result of filters that are applied to the teacher’s listing of students. These filters are selected by the teacher and dynamically produce a listing of students who meet the selected criteria. See the Dynamic Watch List Feature technical article for a complete overview.

Standards Mastery View

The standards mastery view is a feature contributed by the Delaware Department of Education and provides educators with insight on student performance on all assessment tests to date and the ability to drill down by learning standard which enables educators to tailor instruction throughout the year based on concepts that students may or may not be comprehending well. See the Standards Mastery View Feature technical article for more details.

Plugin Architecture

The latest version of the Ed-Fi Dashboard system supports a robust plug-in architecture contributed by the Pennsylvania Department of Education that provides the ability to add implementation-specific dashboard features easily. Plugin modules are self-contained, allowing developers to extend the out-of-the-box functionality without affecting the core dashboard functionality or other dashboard plugins. See the Plugin Architecture Feature technical article for information and a step-by-step walkthrough.

Dashboard Search

The dashboard search feature was enhanced to include results for multiple identification codes. The feature can be configured at the local eduction agency level to include one or many identification systems. See the technical article Searching Multiple Identification Systems for details on how to configure the search.

Technical Improvements and Enhancements

In addition to the new dashboard features listed above, the latest version of the Ed-Fi Dashboard distribution includes a number of technical enhancements, including:

• Changes to support configurable list views (see Configurable List Metadata for details) (New in v1.3.1)
• Changes to the ETL packages that support major improvements to the XML loader performance when working with large datasets
• A new ListMetadataProvider that allows teacher and staff data to be pulled from an external provider (see How To: Pull Metadata from the ListMetadataProvider for details)
• A means of enriching claims from third-party services to include claims required for dashboard authorization (see Dashboard Side Claims Enrichment for details)