Ed-Fi Special Interest Groups

Ed-Fi Special Interest Groups (SIGs) are convened to address key important topics in the evolution of Ed-Fi standards and technology. Unlike governance workgroups, SIGs are initiated by the Alliance with a more narrow focus and designed to produce specific, discrete outputs. They therefore generally only meet a limited number of times. 

SIGs report their work out to to the Technical Advisory Group, who connect SIG outputs to to other Ed-Fi governance processes.

This space is used to record the activities and outcomes of Ed-Fi SIGs.

Current SIGs

SIG

Goals

SIG

Goals

Student Information Systems SIG

  1. Provide input on Ed-Fi standards and Certification, to help ensure these reflect SIS capabilities and industry best practice. 

  2. Provide input on the open-source Ed-Fi technology roadmap, to help ensure its features support needs critical to SIS systems and the vendor community more broadly (e.g., specific authorization configuration, API performance or performance monitoring, roadmap and release practices, etc.)

  3. Identify community best practice and assist the Ed-Fi Alliance in monitoring and improving alignment to Ed-Fi standards. This includes suggesting ways to monitor and improve the alignment of state and other Ed-Fi-based specifications with Ed-Fi's standards, and includes proposing improvements to programmatic work of the Alliance with State Education Agencies, Managed Service Providers, System Integrators and other to align the community to reflect and align to best practice.

  4. Serve as a community-of-practice for SIS systems to learn from each other, especially but not exclusively in the area of Ed-Fi support.

Assessment Provider SIG

  1. Share implementation experiences and challenges

  2. Align with emerging state and data hub requirements

  3. Provide feedback on Ed-Fi technology and data standards — Surface challenges, gaps, and opportunities related to the assessment-scoped portions of the Ed-Fi Data Standard and APIs.

  4. Govern and evolve assessment certification — Contribute to the development and refinement of Ed-Fi's assessment certification process to ensure it aligns with vendor capabilities and field needs.

  5. Coordinate toward more consistent, scalable integrations

https://edfi.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ESIG/pages/2361622529

Explore the patterns, practices, and potential tools to facilitate safe and accurate AI usage of data stored by an Ed-Fi API.

Past SIGs

SIG

Goal

SIG

Goal

Project Meadowlark Special Interest Group

Project Meadowlark is a research and development effort to explore potential for use of new technologies, including managed cloud services, for starting up an Ed-Fi compatible API.

Special Interest Group goals:

  1. Provide input to requirements and design.

  2. Provide review and feedback of "product" demonstrations.

  3. Make recommendations, as appropriate, to the Ed-Fi Alliance about future technology choices.

Data Import 2022

  1. Understand and define pain points that Ed-Fi implementations experience while using Data Import as an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) solution for non-API based data.

  2. Understand other solutions that may be available for reliable ETL pathways for non-API based data.

  3. Inform Data Import future development and roadmap priorities from community blockers, issues and identified needs

Managed Service Provider SIG

  1. Define pain points that Managed Service Providers (MSP) experience in implementing Ed-Fi technology and making it available to community members as productized offerings. 

  2. Provide input into and feedback on the Alliance’s products and roadmap especially as it relates to deployment, automation, security, management, and other priority concerns.

  3. Discuss ideas and opportunities to unblock managed providers in ways that help them scale their offerings. 

College, Career, Military Readiness (CCMR) Special Interest Group

Learning Management Systems Data and Analytics

Special Education Program 

  1. Gather input on opportunities for expansion and improvement of the data model particularly those changes needed by active field work.

  2. Recommend changes to the data model and standards artifacts to assist the community in greater adoption and usage and remove roadblocks. 

Ed-Fi in Containers

Course Transcript Exchange

Strategies for Data Out from the ODS / API

Open Source Rules Engine and Validation API

Ed-Fi Integration with Google Classroom

Data Import 2019

Record Level Ownership in the Ed-Fi ODS

Open Source Databases and Database Diversity

Analytics Middle Tier

Data Exchange and Extensibility in Ed-Fi Suite 3

Temporal ODS Early Adopters Program

Assessment API Vendor Integration

Bulk Data Exchange Over REST API

Data Quality and API Reliability

Investigate API transaction and data quality issues in current Ed-Fi API implementations and recommend API features or other actions that help API client systems recognize and improve efficiency.

Ed-Fi Enumerations

Recommend directions for at the future of enumerations support in Ed-Fi data exchange standards, considering both needs around highly-localized operational contexts (e.g. state reporting) and broad contexts (e.g cross-vendor interoperability to support personalized learning). 

Expanding Date Support in Ed-Fi Technology

Investigate and recommend approaches to enhancing Ed-Fi technology to provide expanded support for use cases related to historical data.

Ed-Fi Dashboards v2.0 Release

Recommend processes and materials needed by the community for adopting the Ed-Fi Dashboards v2.0 upgrade.

Vendor-Vendor Data Exchange

Identify opportunities for Ed-Fi standards and technology to enable vendor-to-vendor data exchange.

API Standard SIG 2023

With Project Meadowlark gaining steam, the ODS/API continuing to strengthen, and non-traditional API hosts exploring new models using an Ed-Fi API, the time has come for revising and reforming the definition of "an Ed-Fi API".

The Ed-Fi Alliance has formal API Guidelines, in addition to the Data Standard. Last revised in 2019, we have an opportunity to turn the guidelines and into an API Standard, while answering the question: what does it mean to be an Ed-Fi compliant API? 

Audience: API hosts, consumers, and data producers.

Managed Service Provider SIG 2023

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion

  1. Gather input on the needs for changes in Ed-Fi language to reflect DEI concerns of Ed-Fi community members.

  2. Use some of the currently created discussions at the Data Standard ticket system as the starting point and make recommendations on those matters.

  3. Recommend changes on other part of the Ed-Fi language and define good practices on the DEI related issues in the future.

Special Education Program 

  1. Gather input on opportunities for expansion and improvement of the data model particularly those changes needed by active field work.

  2. Recommend changes to the data model and standards artifacts to assist the community in greater adoption and usage and remove roadblocks. 

Early Childhood Program

  1. Gather input on opportunities to create, expand and improve the Ed-Fi data model around Early Childhood Domain space particularly those changes needed by active field work.

  2. Recommend changes to the data model and standards artifacts to assist the community in greater adoption and usage and remove roadblocks. 

ODS API Feature Enhancements

  1. Provide input on field usage of existing features

  2. Make recommendations to the Ed-Fi Alliance on prioritizing feature backlog.

  3. Make recommendations to the Ed-Fi Alliance on discontinuation of features that are proving low value to field work