Agenda

Ed-Fi Leadership Update
Ed-Fi Leadership Update
Deep Dive – Vendor support for Ed-Fi
Community Work Groups & TAG – Highlights and Heads-Up
Show & Tell - Ed-Fi-powered Family engagement portal

Link to meeting PPT

Participation

Members:

Support:

rrozzelle, nwilson

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.

Leadership Updates

Dr. Happy Miller was introduced and welcomed as the newest member of the GAT

The next Leadership Council meeting will be held in Florida next week. The focus will be on advancing implementations to success and better communication of the message “Why wouldn’t you do Ed-Fi” and on policy conversations to ensure interoperability at scale.

Deep Dive – Vendor support for Ed-Fi

The top 2020 Leadership Team Focus Area is: Break down vendor barriers to efficiently providing districts data (outside of state reporting).

This agenda item began with a review of the technology provider drivers as well as the push backs. The tech provider ecosystem was discussed, including SIS and assessment certification partners and badging partners for API providers/consumers and ODS platform consumers. Badging is to recognize vendors who are doing something beyond what can be certified – examples include gradebooks and teacher prep APIs.

Discussion followed regarding the question “How do we get more concentrated demand from districts & what is missing from getting this to happen today?”.

Wisconsin manages the certification and data flows for 25 vendors for the state Ed-Fi implementation. They are dealing with both state and local data interoperability issues. While this is difficult, the more centralized state (or large collaborative) model seems to work better for obtaining vendor support for interoperability than do smaller, more expensive and separate projects.
Getting the academic side within a district to understand the value proposition and buy in to the interoperability strategy is difficult. More effective outreach to the chief academic officers is needed to foster their understanding and adoption of interoperability standards when making instructional software decisions. It would be beneficial to cultivate better understanding among instructional staff for how interoperability affects their ability to roll out instructional materials and the total cost of ownership vs sticker price.
In terms of levers, if we know what data a lot of vendors are working toward collecting at the student level (required in Colorado) to help drive/focus demand and coordinate submissions of requests coming from different customers, this might facilitate progress toward better quality interoperability services.
For New Mexico, incorporating Ed-Fi interoperability requirements into the RFP language for special ed wasn’t successful because the model wasn’t in place yet and vendors ignored that part of the RFP – need to ensure that the data and interoperability capabilities are present within a new domain such as SPED in advance of making these RFP requirements.
From a vendor perspective, particularly SIS vendors, the state and local requests for new and unit-level data interoperability are increasing, and the costs of providing this interoperability are over and above the approved plan/contract price. This presents a growing and unpopular set of issues around fees and pricing to cover these costs. Also, interoperability at scale across a state or states requires better standards for things such as for courses within or between states. The customizations options vendors have provided to customers is also a hinderance to cost-effectively adoption data standards. Product flexibility is being sacrificed in order to have the API send quality data.
For assessment vendors, recent work to adopt the assessment outcomes API was very straight forward and leverageable within a short timeframe across several district partners.

The next question discussed was “What forums can we foster for districts and vendors to come together to define real requirements for Ed-Fi integrations?”. We continue to hear from vendors that as they get asked to do implementations for integration there is often a lack of clarity or consistency in the requirements. Vendors have struggled on how best to engage the community to have such more uniform requirements. What role should we take in facilitating that?

Boston has experienced working with an assessment vendor to try to gather and clarify interoperability requirements. Assistance is needed for coordinating/communicating with districts on what the ask is and how to get that information to the right level within the vendor organization.
Vendor perspective on this is whatever the Ed-Fi Alliance can do to get common and fully-fleshed requirements should be done; vendors don’t feel they have the ability to come up with a cross-district set of requirements.
It was noted that the current certification doesn’t go far enough into use cases, particularly on the assessment side. Is it possible through the Alliance to coordinate an agreement across districts/states around more defined use cases?
The notion of a more consistent protocol or approach to capturing and defining requirements was discussed. This could include protocols and structures (mapping.edu) for capturing use cases and the accompanying data/business rule requirements. This would be accompanied by a process to engage states and districts to contribute to these requirements. This could also help to bring consistency to the efforts/outputs of the work groups (such as AWG, TPDM, SPED).
There are so many different understandings about what it means to do Ed-Fi; need to keep it simple and keep beating that drum to help people fully get the connection of what this is about – what it means. People want it but don’t always understand it. Examples from Data Quality Campaign on how data changes things/focus on outcomes – you need data interoperability to do this – may want to use the terminology of the “power of data” rather than interoperability.
There is a need to have better brand awareness around Ed-Fi, especially for business and academic people; how to message to them; trying to simplify a message so we can be consistent; topic has been elevated but for people making decisions they don’t always understand what their ask is; need well-defined use case to know whether or not you have choices---need to be simple in our message but give more education.

The next question discussed was “At the state level, what are the levers that exist to get high fidelity Ed-Fi integrations, that can be made available to districts?”. State reporting is a big hammer but there are disconnects with how integration is done at state level for districts wanting to subsequently use that data locally; are there places in your states on where language can be inserted to give districts access to state reported data-vendor contracts/preferred vendor lists/and such?

Board policy is a way to drive such changes; targeted outreach to Board of Education chairs or school board associations across the US is an option to consider. Giving a push to some key legislators can also help – there is a growing awareness of these issues.
One thing that gets people’s attention is the security of student data – interoperability helps us understand who has data and where it is.

Community Work Groups & Technical Advisory Group

This item was deferred until next GAT meeting.

Show & Tell

A demo of the Yes Prep family engagement portal was provided. Highlights included:

This is a mobile phone app
At the summary level the app displays attendance, behavior, course grades and missed assignments
Provides additional detailed data such as race/ethnicity, contact information, excused/unexcused absences, courses, course schedules
Provides information on the Student Success Team for each student – parents, teachers, etc.
Allows direct chat with teachers through the app with translation across 63 different languages
Version 1 of the code is available in the Exchange today

The meeting was adjourned.

Action Items

The rest of today’s agenda (item #3) and follow up from the discussion for agenda item #2 will be first on next month’s GAT agenda.

Ed-Fi Governance

GAT Meeting - 2020-02-20