Summary

This Confluence page is meant to document the product decisions that have been made and describe the current reasoning for those decisions.  There are varying levels of backing for each of these decisions.  This document will curate those reasons and will hopefully initiate discussions around good and bad approaches to meet the need of the community.

Supporting Documentation

The FIF conversation started with the community and there are two evergreen documents that are facilitating that discussion.  The first is a positioning statement and the second is an organization of actionable directions we can take to help our community.

Project Deck

Public Requirements

First Deliverable - Survey Visualization Tool

The first proposal brought before the community in the project deck was to create:

A tracking and visualization mechanism for the most important school disruption-related data, with teacher and administrator interfaces for visualization, sharing, and easier input.

In our first community meeting, the community responded very positively to our ad-hoc suggestion of creating a survey tool to provide a visualization mechanism from all the survey data coming in from the school disruption.

End User Audience

The primary audience for this tool are teachers

During our conversation with the community we identified other possible users of the system including school administrators, after school partners, and support specialists.  We are planning to solely focus on teachers in the beginning to ensure that we are meeting the needs of a target audience before expanding our scope to include other possible users.

Scope

The FIF tool can be deployed for an entire LEA or for an individual school.  The intent is to make the tool easily enabled for the people whom most need the solution and engage with the people who are ready to move quickly.

LEA's are already familiar with adopting and incorporating cloud based tools in their environment and will be in a position to bring up this application.  LEA level adoption is most useful to keep the LEA IT staff engaged.  It will also offer LEA administration of user information and loading of district wide survey data.  Loading information at the LEA level should reduce the number of "administration" tasks for the school administration and teachers.  Delivering the tool to an entire LEA will also help ensure district wide security can be enforced between teacher and student data access.

An individual school principal may proactively want a tool to help collate the survey results for the students within their school.  This should also be an acceptable use of the FIF tool.  Student data can be loaded into the tool from standard information already in place in the registrars office of the school.  This model may empower the teachers and school administration to more proactively load surveys they have locally requested.  A school staff member can also load any district level information if they've been provided the results already from the district.  This method may initially bypass the LEA's IT administration which we may want to provide tools or resources to pull them in once a principal has engaged with the FIF tool.

Security and Sign-On

Clever, Google, Classlink, and Office 365 are the main players in Single Sign On (SSO) for school districts and this tool needs to provide SSO option to ensure usage by the teachers.  We will address the Google SSO first as that has a significant market share and we have internal experience with this type of SSO integration.

Deployment

LEAs will most likely want to leverage this tool as a cloud based solution to avoid using local resources to stand up an instance.  Some LEAs will be interested in standing up their on-premise instance when they have the local resources and want to ensure appropriate security is in place.  The goal of the FIF project is to accommodate both these deployment models.  The role of Ed-Fi is not to stand up or host a version of this software.  We will maintain a demo version to solicit additional feedback and support the community but any deployed instance should come from other resources.

The technical stack of FIF will eventually use Docker to deploy the solution across cloud solutions as well as support on premise deployments. 

Note:  We will approach the established management providers and participating collaboratives as ways to stand up instances of FIF so that schools and districts can adopt this tool.

Student/Teacher Data Sourcing

This tool will operate independent of the ODS and should be use-able without an ODS present.  This decision was made to ensure the tool was use-able at the teacher level of education and to make sure it could be adopted by any LEA or school.  To accomplish this goal, the FIF tool will need to consider importing student and teacher data from the following sources:

• Clever Level API import data (using their CSV format)
• ODS import script (similar to Douglas Loyo's engagement approach)
• Registrar available flat data format (possibly following Clever CSV guidelines)

We can hopefully keep this import process simplified by documenting the file format needed to populate the FIF tool.  Many districts and schools have resources to manage the data formatting.

Survey Data Sourcing

The initial survey data loader will rely on the simplistic CSV export found in Google Forms and SurveyMonkey.  The informal poll of the community noted that majority of the surveys they were working with came from Google Forms.  This flattened CSV source allows for a wide range of student data to be imported into the system agnostic to the source collection mechanism.  We will not initially pursue a more direct data import strategy from a survey tool to ensure the we continue to move quickly and keep a wide range of options for allowing data import.  The initial feedback is that many survey tools are being used at this time.

Synchronizing the student data in the surveys and the student/teacher import will need to reflect an entry for District Student Id or State Student Id.  We may need to consider a fuzzy survey inclusion like student name and guardian name.

Data Management

The data included in the FIF tool is coming from outside systems and surveys.  The FIF tool will be considered read-only.  FIF will provide tools to help with importing data, removing stale data, or refreshing data sets within itself.  There is still an issue of the survey data going out-of-date and the FIF tool needs a mechanism to stay current.  For example, a student may have answered a survey saying that they didn't have a dedicated device but later acquired a device.  The FIF community communicated a strong need to capture this information but acknowledges that the updates captured do not need to go anywhere else and can remain in the FIF tool.  To accomplish this, the FIF tool will implement a notes feature.  This feature will allow a teacher to include new information or highlight a change in previous information.  The notes won't change the original details but can provide a way for teachers to cover-up out-of-date information.  These notes will remain in the FIF tool and won't be considered for export.

Filtering Data

There is an anticipation in the FIF community that the number of surveys and supporting data for a student could become too large for a teacher to see all at once.  There will need to be a way filter that data to improve the teachers ability to see what is going on in the system.  The solution will need to leverage the previously mentioned data management as well as a way to hide data that the teacher rarely or never uses.  This is envisioned in two ways.  First, an administrator should be able to to flag surveys or survey results as important so that any initial view of the student would only include the important flagged items.  Second, this would be a tool that could be overridden or updated from the teacher so they can customize what information they regularly see when using the system.

Searching Data

Similar to "Data Management" and "Filtering Data" sections there is a necessary method for locating specific information in the system quickly.  The search mechanism should provide quick access to a specific person or piece of information.  The teacher may be using this to see how their students reacted to a specific survey question or see information on a specific student.

Reporting

The reporting mechanism for this tool will be an In-App visualization so the teacher doesn't need any other tools to see the data as it relates to her class.  The primary forms of aggregation will be for a teacher to see the student individual, all their students in a section, and all their students.  Any aggregation should support drill down into the individual student so the teacher can take action.

Open Source Community

This project is an open source project and community supported.  We are making technology stack decisions based on this goal to allow broader community support.  You can find more information about the current technology stack in the Project Buzz Solution Architecture document.   Ed-Fi's goal for this project is to facilitate the community's conversation and provide development resources to make the FIF solution available.  Ed-Fi is not looking to be the sole developer on the project but will provide development resources to ensure the projects success.