The meeting was held via WebEx from 11 to 12:30 pm CT.

Agenda

Ed-Fi Leadership Updates
Follow up from last month’s meeting
1. Finalize Pain points survey
2. Dashboard destiny call for participation
3. Special education call for participation
Community work group activities
1. Finance work group
2. Assessment work group
Governance activities
1. Discussion topic: Proposed approach for longitudinal data
Next steps and key dates

Participation

Members:

Support:

Meeting Minutes

Refer to the meeting PPT (link above) for additional details on the meeting minutes and discussions.

When available, meeting minutes should be read, and any corrections sent to Chris. All GAT members should ensure they have access to Tech Docs.

No comments on minutes from August meeting.

1. Ed-Fi Leadership Updates

Executive session discussion.

2. Discussion: Finalize Pain Points Survey

The draft survey was sent out to the GAT for comment. The goal is to determine “what we want to prime the pump for” - what the challenges and priorities are according to the Ed-Fi Community. At the Summit the survey will be administered to get a large response. It was suggested that the list be extended to consider data domains. The GAT should send any other feedback to Chris as soon as possible.

3. Discussion: Analytics and Visualization Work Group

This work group (which will have a special focus on Dashboard Destiny) will be meeting for the first time at the Ed-Fi Summit. The Alliance has contracted with Itzel Torres for additional support to help manage and facilitate the work group. To date, there have been seven members signing up. It was recommended to recruit Wyoming SEA and other LEAs including Providence (RI), Rio Rancho (NM) and Uncommon Schools (NY). The work group needs to discuss what is the “bright, shiny object” if not the dashboard.

4. Discussion: Special Education Work Group

There have been six responses to join a Special Education work group, but there was no one from an LEA. This is a pain point for districts from simple special education rostering to eligibility to transportation and more. Boston PS will engage one of their colleagues to join the group. From a vendor perspective, state reporting for special ed is also an important area. There needs to be a critical mass to move this forward. It was recommended to ask Don Dailey from Michigan for LEA participants. It was also suggested that AEM’s Generate project has a ready-made community, and the work CELT is doing in Massachusetts around IEPs is an opportunity to enlist other colleagues in the special ed community. The Alliance will work to hire a contractor to pick this up and take it to the next step of forming a work group.

5. Finance Work Group Update

The decision was made to proceed with a standard set of extensions with WI DPI taking the lead to implement the proposal. The selected approach allows leaving the current domain model in place to avoid breaking changes. This approach is also planned for Generate-EdFacts extensions, and for the teacher prep data model work.

GAT member discussion endorsed the direction and felt the flexibility model makes sense.

The need for such an approach was also expressed at the recent SEA user group meeting. The long-term implications of the design should be considered as SEAs want these components to be interconnected over time. The FWG model was fleshed out with only SEA use cases and no real LEA use cases. Should we uncover LEA use cases around the model?

6. Assessment Work Group Update

The three subgroups have been meeting – Use Case, API Awareness and Adoption and Technical Subgroups.

The most recent focus for the Use Case subgroup has been on the Put/Get Proposal and the cross-referencing learning standards use case. The latter effort may benefit from the AB partnership mentioned above.

For API Awareness and Adoption, they have been reviewing and enhancing the vendor engagement tracking tool. There was a suggestion to modify the tracking tool to allow the collection of a profile of LEA and SEA licensees and what products/vendors they are using. This could be done through a survey at or following the Summit.

The Technical Subgroup did not meet in September, but it will convene after the Summit to address the backlog. The Assessment API SIG had done work previously to identify and plug API gaps that have surfaced during vendor certification efforts.

7. Discussion: Longitudinal Data Proposal

A proposed approach for the Alliance's role and investment in solutions for longitudinal data was presented for discussion. The recommendation from Ed-Fi staff is that the temporal ODS should be released in the Ed-Fi Exchange and not incorporated into Ed-Fi Core. See the meeting PPT for specific details. There has been a long-term demand for longitudinal data (back to 2014). In 2017, /wiki/spaces/TT/pages/18645825 showed that the T-ODS was to be released as part of ODS/API v2.4 or v.25. However there is a lack of real-world implementation evidence to support inclusion into Ed-Fi core. It has also been a struggle to get actual use cases for the T-ODS which is a hindrance to the design. It is difficult to modify data from previous years by API. This requirement introduces a lot of complexity. Snapshot, bulk load and query have been developed and tested in 2018 with Tulsa. Other longitudinal architectures are being considered and implemented in the Ed-Fi Ecosystem, for example, data vault (Certica Data Connect, SFUSD and California CORE) and customized, home-grown architectures in Arizona and Wisconsin SEA's.

GAT discussion supported the recommendation from Ed-Fi staff.

8. Upcoming Date

In-person GAT meeting at the Ed-Fi Summit: Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018 from 9 to 10:30 am CT

Ed-Fi Governance

GAT Meeting - 2018-09-20