GAT Meeting - 2020-06-18

Owned by Chris Moffatt (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jun 23, 2020
6 min read

Agenda

  1. Welcome to New Members
  2. Leadership Updates
  3. Covid-19 Response
    1. Check-in with GAT members on current status and community priorities
    2. Digital Equity Data Collection
    3. Fix-It Fridays
  4. Governance Activities
    1. GAT Review of 2 Proposed Ed-Fi RFC’s
    2. Proposed Adjustments to the Ed-Fi Certification Program

Link to meeting PPT

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Meeting Minutes

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

Previous meeting minutes can be found here.

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

Welcome to New Members

Jennifer Downey (replacing Jon Berry as the Infinite Campus at-large rep) and Doug Quinton (with PowerSchool as the TAG rep) were recognized and welcomed as new members of the GAT.

Leadership Updates

Based on feedback received from GAT and others, the fall Ed-Fi Summit will not be held in person in 2020. Instead, a series of asynchronous online sessions will be provided. This will be announced in next week’s newsletter. The Technical Congress is being planned for Spring 2021 in San Diego.

Covid-19 Response - Updates from GAT Members

  • Boston – currently focused on closing out school year and starting summer school – fully remote. Trying to track missing students. Question is what does school look like next year. Another key question in the district now is “how do you know what kids know”. There is an increasing need to be planful about what data to collect especially when looking at effectiveness of virtual learning.
  • TEA / Teacher prep – considering how they gather data and verify certification for teachers under revised (suspended) certification rules – need to track folks impacted by suspension of rules and address educator preparation accountability requirements.
  • Wisconsin – prioritizing services for districts with big push for equity, a current focus on working with health department on immunization integration on a nightly basis, and loading assessment outcomes into the ODS.

COVID-19 Response - Digital Equity Data Collection

Maureen reviewed the efforts to help LEAs and SEAs collect data on device and wi-fi access at scale. This is an important issue for digital equity – want to make better decisions and understand home environment. Data on reliable internet and device access at home (by individual student) is needed to better target funding. LEAs are collecting this data now by surveys, google forms and phone calls.

Major SIS vendors are part of the discussion to get this production ready for August 2020. This is based into core rather than extensions. LEA feedback indicates that collecting this data at the time the student is registered is a preferred approach. Nebraska, Wisconsin, Arizona and Delaware are driving this with goal that when vendors get the ask it is in one common format. The intent of the Ed-Fi initiative is to collect this data at scale and store the data in the SIS to be passed on to the SEA ODS.

Feedback from GAT members:

  • Wisconsin encouraged vendors to step up and support this. Districts need this data to be collected at registration – this is critical data for SEAs and LEAs. This is an optional collection for Wisconsin, but strongly encouraged.
  • Boston does not store this data in the SIS – many districts don’t.
  • Infinite Campus – their solution won’t be through their online registration because this is a premium product not used by all customers – but this is not the only avenue to collect this data - IC has another approach that includes a survey tool that loads data back to the SIS – this is more open to all their customers.

COVID-19 Response - Fix-It Fridays

David Clements  introduced the first tool to result from the Fix-it-Friday efforts. This is a flexible, agile response to the COVID-19 impact assessment to identify high-priority areas on which to focus. The top priority topic to be addressed is with regard to new data that is resulting from COVID-19 issues and overwhelming the teachers. Survey data for COVID-19 issues covering multiple topics are passed on to teachers to assimilate and use. This data includes student-level information on internet (wi-fi) access in the home, devices available to students at home and the best ways to reach students and parents. 

The tool focuses on providing a mobile visualization for teachers and administrators into the data that is coming back from these data collections. There are 21 active community members participating and holding weekly discussion as part of this work. The goal is to have the tool ready for trial in mid-July. David did a demo of the tool – the information it presents includes:

  • Basic demographic data (likely from the SIS)
  • Student and family needs data (e.g. data gathered from surveys)
  • Device / connectivity information
  • Student wellness info and trends
  • Preferred method of contact (such as time of day or hearing difficulties)
  • Teacher check-in / observation data on student learning progress/engagement
  • Important online info for students (Google IDs, lookup info, etc.)
  • Services received by students (incl students with IEPs)

Feedback from GAT members:

  • Get rid of pie charts if have more than 2 classes – use bar charts – easier to discern differences.
  • A UX designer has been engaged to give feedback and this has been pointed out

The Alliance will continue to use Fix-it-Fridays to surface other projects to pursue.

GAT Review of Proposed RFC’s

Ed-Fi RFC: Survey API (GOV-21)

TPDM and Alliance staff recommended this RFC which puts survey API and data domain into the core. Survey API and data are currently part of the teacher prep data model. Detailed specification and data model for this RFC are available in tech docs. COVID-19 surveys substantiate the need for the survey RFC. There are similarities with assessment domain and there was some debate over whether to combine survey and assessment domains. The RFC recommends not to combine as there is value in maintaining separate entities.

GAT Discussion

  • Were Survey Monkey, Survey Gizmo and Qualtrix contacted regarding the proposed survey API and data model? Ed-Fi to follow-up on this question
    • Ed-Fi Follow up: During the Survey RFC work, Ed-Fi technical staff performed an analysis of these vendors public API’s, and verified that the data represented in those interfaces could be mapped to Ed-Fi Survey API. Additionally, there has been some contact with these vendors by Ed-Fi community members, but to date the Alliance has not engaged with these vendors to encourage them to build support for survey in the Ed-Fi API. This is anticipated to start once the Survey RFC is approved for inclusion in Ed-Fi Core.
  • Boston - recommend include Panorama in discussion as this is an important vendor for many districts for survey and SEL data.
  • Surveys need to accommodate anonymous surveys, parent surveys, teacher surveys about students and student survey about teachers. Are these supported in the specification? Ed-Fi to follow-up on whether or not these use cases are supported by the Survey RFC.
    • Ed-Fi Follow up: The Ed-Fi Survey RFC supports all of the use cases mentioned above (anonymous surveys, parent surveys, teacher surveys about students and student survey about teacher). The RFC documentation should be updated to make this clearer.

Ed-Fi RFC 24: Core student API (GOV-22)

The proposed changes are the result of ongoing field work operationalizing the data exchange structures in RFC 16, and seek to expand the data elements or make other changes necessary to support use cases around the exchange of data for domains common to student information systems in K-12 education. The changes proposed in this RFC are intended to be non-breaking to most API clients. In order to help make the RFC non-breaking, the RFC proposes deprecation of data model elements.

GAT members will be requested to vote on advancing these 2 RFC's, via Google form to be sent out after the meeting.

Proposed Adjustments to the Ed-Fi Certification Program

Ed-Fi community members have proposed additional changes to certification in response to new issues:

  1. Systems must be able to demonstrate that API connectivity is available to multiple endpoints. That is, an API client must be able to demonstrate capability to maintain operations against multiple APIs hosted by different organizations.
  2. The certifying product must demonstrate the use of school district (i.e. local) CourseCodes. Use of exclusively state CourseCodes will not meet this requirement.

Feedback from GAT members

  • Need to consider differences among states. In our state no district has hosted Ed-Fi; in other states state has it and some districts host, in third scenario state doesn’t have Ed-Fi but some districts do.
  • Infinite Campus – they support multiple endpoints (SEA and LEA) but this is a big lift – for a small vendor this may not be reasonable. In states where there is no required state implementation for Ed-Fi this will be difficult to support.
  • PowerSchool – supports multiple implementations (endpoints for SEA and LEA) – they look at SEA differently from LEA requirements.
  • Fayette – what is the feasibility of a configuration file to specify SEA or LEA configurations?

Action Items:

  • GAT members to vote on advancing the Survey and Core Student API RFC's.

Next meeting: July 16, 2020 at noon ET