Learning Management Systems Data and Analytics - Report Out

The SIG addressed 3 questions:

1. Identify and prioritize primary use cases for LMS data within the Ed-Fi community
2. Provide input into and feedback on the Alliance's work to deliver a Starter Kit focused on LMS data and on the LMS Toolkit more generally
3. Provide direction on the overlap of the current Gradebook data domain with the evolving LMS data model and review the Gradebook model generally.

These were the outcomes of the SIG on these questions:

1. Identify and prioritize primary use cases for LMS data within the Ed-Fi community

The overall advice of the SIG was to prioritize the use case of recent student engagement, based on assignment completion. This represents a change from the prior focus on attendance, which had arisen under the impacts of the COVID pandemic.

The SIG observed that assignments are more normalized across LMS systems and K12 operational processes and so there is a scale opportunity to leverage these. Further, activity data is inherently platform-specific, messy, and large in volume, so creates complexity and scale issues. This was the reasoning behind a focus on assignment data first.

2.Provide input into and feedback on the Alliance's work to deliver a Starter Kit focused on LMS data and on the LMS Toolkit more generally

The main advice was to follow the guidance under goal #1: focus on student engagement as evidenced by assignment completion. The SIG offered some existing field work examples to turn to as examples of visualizations the Alliance Starter Kit could focus on. 

3.Provide direction on the overlap of the current Gradebook data domain with the evolving LMS data model and review the Gradebook model generally.

On this issue, the general guidance of the SIG was that LMS Assignments and Gradebook should be modeled separately as they are more often distinct in field work. There is a clear progression or workflow from LMS to Gradebook.

The canonical field use case is that the LMS has assignment data which captures the "raw" data: the completion date, the actual student work, the teacher feedback, etc. There may also be a score attached to an assignment submission instance, and it is possible that this is the canonical gradebook score. But in many cases today, the score information attached to an assignment is NOT necessarily the gradebook score. The canonical case is that the gradebook resides in the SIS, so there is a process of moving data from one platform to another.

In some cases, that process is automated, and in such a case it MIGHT be possible to consider the assignment completion data as the gradebook data. But in many cases, this is a manual teacher-driven process, where changes or additional translations of the data from LMS to gradebook can come into play.

For example, teachers can decide that a assignment was "not actually late" and modify a score as it is entered into the SIS gradebook. In such a case, the LMS and the SIS scores would differ. This situation reflects that there are two different systems-of-record as well: the LMS and the SIS.

For this reason, the SIG advised to keep these domains separate and envision a process of moving data along a workflow.