UI Developers' Guide - Overview

The Ed-Fi Student Performance Dashboards bring together a wide range of student-level data from disparate data sources and present it in a visually intuitive user interface. The Ed-Fi Dashboards are made available to Ed-Fi licensees as a development starter kit, and can be customized to include implementation-specific data.

Positive change for students begins in the classroom with one educator and one student. The Ed-Fi Dashboards display metrics at the student level, and focus on that important relationship. Intervention doesn't end at the classroom, though, so the dashboards layer classroom, school, and district level metrics to ensure that every student is supported through all levels of the educational system. This layering approach also ensures that the data tells a consistent, coherent story about a student. The metrics in the dashboard have been validated by reviews of best practices by states and districts, and are backed by research studies that have identified these metrics as predictors of student success.

Metrics are calculations – and calculations require data. The Ed-Fi Dashboard data stores can be loaded from a variety of source systems to populate the dashboards. A conceptual view of an Ed-Fi technology implementation follows:

The metrics that appear on the dashboard user interface are primarily driven by a high-performance Dashboard Data Store which is populated via ETL from an Ed-Fi Operational Data Store, which is a relational database containing fine-grained information related to students. Data can be bulk loaded into the operational data store via XML files that validate against the Ed-Fi Standard Interchanges, or loaded via a transactional API. 

The sections that follow cover the important technical information needed to implement the Ed-Fi Dashboards.