GAT Meeting - 2021-01-26

Owned by Chris Moffatt (Deactivated)
Last updated: Sep 20, 2021
6 min read

Agenda

  1. Reflections on the upcoming year
  2. Alliance updates
    • Changes to Tier 1 Workgroups
    • Update on Alliance Marketing & Communications focus in 2021
  3. Discussion topic: Improving vendor support for Ed-Fi APIs
  4. Wrap-up

Refer to the PPT (which can be found here) for additional details on the meeting minutes and discussions.

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

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Meeting Minutes

Agenda Item #1: Reflections on the Upcoming Year

Troy Wheeler – Ed-Fi Alliance

  • Fix it Friday work addresses practical needs collectively
  • Work of education is critically important to bridge the gap
  • How can we best support you and your peers across the country


​Dean Folkers – Nebraska

  • 11 month perpetuating marathon – a significant challenge to ensure that the decisions we make in response to pandemic are transformational change for the future
  • It is not lost learning – it is unfinished learning – focused on renewal and acceleration network over next two plus years including summer school – significant need for data including some we have not captured before – needs to be actionable, supporting both districts and state
  • We need to move physical offices by Feb.14th and where we are going won’t be ready until April/May
  • Record retention and storage challenges

 John Raub – Wisconsin

  • Focus on collecting and standardizing digital equity data
  • Audit data to TMobile for districts handing out hotspots
  • High dependency on geo coding so inequities’ data is more precise
  • Pilot to full production with immunization API – shared with Ed-Fi Community; popular feature esp re time saved for school nurses but concern with incomplete records due to limited access to students’ doctors
  • Moving to Azure from on premises hosting
  • Retiring API version 2

 Happy Miller – Rio Rancho, NM

  • Starting to plan for next year and assuming students will be back in the classroom – considering elementary virtual option
  • Hard to plan when we don’t know what we are doing 2 to 3 weeks from now; Gov announced schools are opening Feb. 8th for districts that can meet COVID-19 guidelines - to be an individual LEA decision
  • Secondary schools are to have kids in same room with teachers changing – not doable esp. with required spacing of desks
  • Short custodians and bus drivers etc. to make everything happen
  • Waiting for teachers to be vaccinated
  • Submitting waiver request for DOE to let districts opt into testing but there is not yet a formal waiver request available
  • State considering going back to Ed-Fi for state reporting and Rio Rancho is involved so our data can be connected as proof of concept

 Jennifer Downey – Infinite Campus

  • Challenge of last 9 months being reactive – could not be proactive but focused on helping with blended learning, scheduling and attendance
  • Hoping this year will be easier for all and we are able to return to our prior goals
  • Expect to address what blended learning is going to look like in the future

  Doug Quinton – PowerSchool

  • Quick additions to Ed-Fi specs
  • Increase in Ed-Fi interest/efforts such as Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Dakota
  • Indiana’s production implementation includes a very difficult certification process that has consumed 2 staff members

 Mark Olofson – Texas Education Agency

  • Policy changes with waivers to get more new teachers into the classroom and some of our collections were cancelled – have new data that should help us understand teacher market
  • Downstream from standing up new indicator that measures student growth for new teachers and back to Educator Prep Programs (EPPs) but don’t have data from last year because there was no state assessment
  • Long term goals of retention and quality of educator but need short and middle term goals – turnover, retention, attrition
  • Roadblocks resolved re TPDM and working to get LEA teacher data to EPPs and want to get EPP data to LEA

 Rosh Dhanawade – INsite

  • Collaborative has paused outreach for growth but still have LEAs coming to us so have had organic growth – 24 districts now compared to 10
  • In part spurred by support from vendors (PowerSchool, Skyward and Harmony) working to make user experience as seamless as possible with LEA and SEA implementations
  • Want LEA to see value of Ed-Fi with data management on day-to-day basis and not just state reporting; want to empower LEA clients able to talk about Ed-Fi in their language – helps them push us rather than having us drag them along
  • Ready to launch new dashboard – core slimmer dashboard built directly off of analytics middle tier (Jan 30 release date)

Agenda Item #2: Alliance Updates

Changes to Tier 1 Work Groups

Planned changes to Work Groups in 2021

  • More organic and inclusive structure for work groups​
  • If any “open” Ed-Fi  group is meeting on a regular or semi-regular basis, include it as a work group -- expansion​
  • No “proxy” staff ownership – topics and actions should flow naturally from Alliance staff goals​
  • Dial back more bureaucratic expectations a bit (e.g., charters, sourcing priorities from chairs, etc.)​
  • Connect work groups with a layer of common and helpful services​
  • Retire work groups if inactive for extended periods​
  • Retain roles of governance in data standards approval, but de-emphasize

2 existing work groups are closing​

2 new work groups are starting up​

  • SEA User Group – facilitated by Sayee Srinivasan​
  • LEA/Collaborative WG – facilitated by Sean Casey​

GAT membership​

  • We will add GAT members from the identified chairs of the new WG’s​
  • After that will review balance/weighting and make additional at-large appointments if needed 

Update on Alliance Marketing & Communications Focus in 2021

Digital Strategy Plan for 2021

Content strategy: Focus on anchor content each quarter, that is relevant to the moment​

​Email cadence:​

  • 2020: 2 catch-all newsletters per month to the entire mailing list​
  • 2021: A more targeted cadence​
    • Week One: Newsletter ​​
    • Week Two: Audience Specific Clips, news articles, etc. from Team Leads ​​
    • Week Three: Audience Events, webinars, 3rd party events ​​
    • Floating/As Needed: Special news and announcements relevant to specific audiences

 Events Strategy for 2021

Confirmed that we can reschedule the Technical Congress for Spring 2022 at the same hotel location in San Diego, CA without financial penalty.This unblocks finalizing the overall events and engagement strategy for 2021. We plan update the GAT on the finalized plan in the February.

Agenda #3: Discussion Topic – Improving Vendor Support for Ed-Fi APIs

This topic was first raised in September 2020 from Wisconsin, suggesting a vendor rating process with the intent of encouraging more effort around improving vendor APIs.  The request was studied further to determine options around existing such rating systems. A report was provided to the GAT in November, and further discussions continued in January 2021.   The problem set was clarified to recognize:

  1. That improving the performance and efficacy of vendor support for Ed-Fi APIs is critical to the ongoing success of the Ed-Fi movement.
  2. The root causes of the API issues connect to the vendors as well as to the education agencies.
    • Student Information Systems are the ERPs of the education world and as such are very complicated and in some cases have organically expanded in ways that don’t lend them to easy data-out strategies.
    • Education agencies (especially LEAs) vary greatly in their requirements for data from their SISs and present numerous requests on the SIS vendors for customizations to integrations with the ODS.

Remedies suggested to the GAT include:

  1. Collaboration between agencies and vendors for solutions:
    • Agencies will need to be more focused regarding their integration scope – defining and adopting well-defined community-driven use cases
    • Vendors will then be able to better focus their efforts to improve APIs around the smaller set of use cases and better-defined requirements and be more transparent on actual payload definition.
  2. A forum for discussion of integration issues – including an effective, two-way feedback loop with helpful information (metrics) should inform the work as it moves forward.

Recommended next steps:

  • GAT sub-group enlisted to flesh out an approach and craft metrics to address the collective problem.​
  • Co-leads selected (vendor and agency co-leads).​
  • Support person(s) to be assigned from the Alliance.

GAT discussion on the topic included the following:

  • The expectations, time commitments and roles need to be clarified
  • Happy suggested that issues being addressed could be communicated to agencies so they might join the discussions of most interest/impact to them.
  • There are 2 categories of areas of study - LEA data submissions to SEAs and LEA implementations and use of the data internally.
  • There are some topics that cross all vendor lines.
  • John - Starter kits will be particularly helpful to LEAs.

Wrap up – Open Discussion:

  • Nancy complimented InSite’s progress toward developing a dashboard and willingness to share with Metro-Nashville.
  • John Raub lobbied for more visibility and broader participation into the types of sharable artifacts that are being developed, such as the immunization work and the dashboard.
  • Dean asked how we might get interested parties engaged in the development phases of shareable artifacts.
  • Jennifer commented that the SIS vendors would benefit from SEAs and vendors working together to make data requests across agencies more similar/standard. The digital equity work was good but SEAs need to adhere better to the agreed-upon standard formats.

Action Items

  • Address request for an Ed-Fi blog post on the WI immunization API
  • Invite Community members and establish GAT member chairs for SEA and LEA/Collaborative transformed work groups
  • Launch GAT subgroup on improving Vendor support for APIs

Next meeting: February 25th, 2021