1.0 Introduction

The work group will propose versions of Ed-Fi data standards suitable for broad international deployment and usage. Like the current Ed-Fi standards operating in United States K12 education, the standards will focus on primary and secondary education. The standards will seek to reuse, leverage or otherwise align to existing Ed-Fi and IMS Global ® data models and specifications, including CEDS as currently reflected in these specifications, operating at scale today in the US K12 market, so as to minimize the risk of disruption to current market momentum for existing standards.

The work group will focus on a limited number of domains closest to measurement, analysis, and improvement of student performance. The priority use case is to develop structures that allow an entity charged with providing direct educational services to students to source information from disparate systems and combine that information to produce actionable analytical insights of direct benefit to the principal actors in the education process, including classroom teachers, guardians, learners and local school system administrators. Other secondary use cases serving other parties may be defined and adopted as necessary.

2.0 Goals

The goals of the work group are:

1. Produce and maintain a version of the Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model (UDM) suitable for broad international deployment and usage. This “internationalized UDM” will focus on data domains closest to measurement, analysis, and improvement of student performance.
2. Produce and maintain API specifications that describe data formats (bindings) to the internationalized UDM, data transport requirements, and associated normative application behavior. These APIs should reuse to the extent practicable existing Ed-Fi and IMS API structures so as not to disrupt current market momentum.
3. Consider and document how to align or incorporate the standards from Ed-Fi and IMS Global® above better to meet the target use cases, including how to minimize impact to current market momentum towards interoperability.
4. Where necessary, produce use cases that clarify more precisely the scope of the specifications.
5. Where necessary, produce best practice recommendations to help increased standardization and interoperability when using the standards.

3.0 Work Products and Contributions to Ed-Fi

All artifacts produced by the work group will be made available under an Apache 2 open source license. See: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

4.0 Initial Focus Areas

See section 2.0 Goals above. Initial focus will be on a data model and standardized API bindings to the model. Use cases will be prioritized where they are helpful to clarify decisions about scope. Initial domains will include people and demographics, enrollment, grades, attendance, behavior, assessment, program participation, and teaching and learning.

5.0 Operations

This work group will follow operating norms described in the  Community Work Groups Operations Charter.