GAT Meeting - 2019-4-11

Owned by Chris Moffatt (Deactivated)
Last updated: May 20, 2019
5 min read

The meeting was held in person at the Ed-Fi Technical Congress, 2019.

Agenda

  1. Ed-Fi executive update
  2. Work Group Updates
  3. IMS QTI linking to Ed-Fi assessment API 
  4. Ed-Fi Certification
  5. Ed-Fi Integration with Google Classroom

 Link to meeting PPT

Participation

Members:

Support:

Meeting Minutes

Refer to the meeting PPT for additional details on the meeting minutes and discussions.

When available, meeting minutes should be read, and any corrections sent to Chris.

Work Group Updates

Finance Work Group

The FWG has met their initial three goals and the group planned to use the Tech Congress meeting to discuss what comes next, i.e. whether or not to stay in place, and if so, to update the work group charter.

Maureen reported that there wasn't a quorum present to have a meaningful discussion on the future direction, so this will occur at a work group meeting after the Technical Congress.

The FWG approach of taking a project to completion is a model for going forward with other work groups

Assessment Work Group

The AWG met during the Technical Congress and examined the Tech Subgroup priorities. The group also identified several problem areas to tackle in 2019. These included: usage data and clarification around certification.

Jami raised the point that it would ideal if the AWG took ownership of linking LEAs and SEAs to assessment vendors who are pursuing certification so that they might assist with the process and provide useful use case guidance. The AWG is using Metro Nashville Public Schools to help determine how robust the initial mapping has been with NWEA. 

Education agencies would like the ability to specify more information in the RFP process for assessment vendors.

Action item: Engage Seth Winerman at Curriculum Associates to identify SEAs and LEAS that might assist with certification (Rick).

Reporting & Visualization Work Group

The RVWG meeting had a lot of new faces. Discussion led to a decision to take what was started with the early warning dashboard and build out with discipline. Furthermore, the RVWG is scoping out what qualities a reporting tool needs to have; want to refine input into user stories and build coalitions across the levels of hierarchies.

IMS QTI linking to Ed-Fi assessment API

Billy provided an overview of the use case for linking IMS QTI results reporting to Ed-Fi Assessment API. The main idea is that if there was linkage (for example,  via a tool that transforms the formats between QTI & Ed-Fi), assessment vendors could be motivated to support both standards. The main class of vendors in scope are high stakes testing/exam provides. For example, Caveon (the largest testing/exam security vendor) is interested in Ed-Fi – as they want and need a consistent reporting results format.  They are  interested in Ed-Fi and also xAPI. Open Assessment Technologies is also interested in such a way to combine specs

A potential project is to lay out what is in QTI and what is in the Ed-Fi Assessment domain, and identify gaps and overlaps. The GAT disussion on this topic led to a recommendation that the appropriate place to pursue this is within the AWG Technical Subgroup.

Action item: Chris to provide a hand-off of this idea to the AWG technical subgroup lead (Eric).

Ed-Fi Certification

The Alliance shared proposed enhancements to Ed-Fi certification, i.e. (a) the intent to add customer references and (b) availability information. See the slides for more detail on these items. Furthermore, the GAT would serve as an entity to mediate and resolve discrepancies or disputes regarding the availability of certified products.

During discussion, GAT members suggested potential refinements, including:

  • For new certifications if there are no customer references available, the designation may include a level 1 = certified but no references and a level 2 = certified and customer verified. 
  • Certification could also recognize the data that is made available through the API.
  • Customer references could indicate which domains of data (or API resources) where being consumed in the referring agencies implementation

Overall, the GAT is supportive of both the proposed enhancements and fulfilling the role of resolving disputes.

The Alliance will provide a detailed plan to implement these proposals, for GAT review and endorsement at the May meeting.

Ed-Fi Integration with Google Classroom

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction performed a survey to find out what use cases districts would like to enable using Ed-Fi infrastructure. They identified that 13 of the 22 largest WI districts use Google Classroom, and teachers have to recreate roster information in the tool. A use case would be to provide a method to pull roster data from the Ed-Fi ODS/API into Google Classroom. See the slide deck for more details.

There is a third party tool -  Little SIS Sync Agent - that will link rosters to Google Classroom

In addition to populating roster information in Google Classroom, Jami expressed that there is interest within the Alliance and MSDF to  surface other useful data from Ed-Fi for teachers in Google Classroom - i.e. providing actionable information in environments where they are already working, vs. asking them to go to a standalone dashboard.

John also reflected that another pain point for educators is how move gradebook data from an LMS (Google Classroom and others) to the SIS. This is a bigger issue that includes LMS feed to grade book, this is another IMS collaboration touch point (i.e. OneRoster).

At the conclusion of the discussion, there was consensus that this is an interesting use case that is worth exploring further with the Ed-Fi community. To that end the Alliance will facilitate establishing a Special Interest Group to convene interested parties and further document the use case, and identify potential options for a solution. It will be important to get representation from Google Classroom educators on the SIG, and Google Classroom representation if possible/

Other Business

Tim Casey (Unlicensed) reported that he has taken on a new role at Skyward, and will be stepping away from Ed-Fi work - so therefore needs to give up his GAT seat. The Alliance and GAT expressed appreciation for his service! Given this, the Alliance will work to appoint another representative to the GAT to represent the TAG, as well as an at-large appointment of a representative from the ed-tech sector. In addition we anticipate GAT representation to come from the newly formed work groups (SPED and TPDM). Nancy.Smithwill represent TPDM work group in the interim. 

Action Items