GAT Meeting - 2021-04-29

Owned by Ann Su
Last updated: May 11, 2021 by Chris Moffatt (Deactivated)
6 min read

Agenda

  1. Tier 1 Work Groups
    • Review of charters for newly formed work groups
    • Health metrics
  2. External / related initiatives
    • Ed-Fi & CEDS overlaps (Dean)
    • Bringing together disparate interoperability efforts (Jami)
  3. Planning for End-of-Support for Ed-Fi Technical Suite 2 (Chris)

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.

Participation

Members:

Support:

Meeting Minutes

Agenda Item #1: Tier 1 Work Groups

New Charters

Collaboratives Work Group Charter shared by Noah Bookman. Sean Casey is the Ed-Fi Alliance liaison helping to pull the work group together. To date eleven collaboratives are represented and have begun meeting monthly. The charter has been developed including the following 4 goals:

  1. Prioritization: Identify and prioritize potential Ed-Fi data model and/or technology enhancements needed to positively impact collaboratives’ capabilities to onboard and serve LEAs with priority use cases support, and to provide right-sized solutions for small and rural LEAs as well as for medium and large LEAs across a range of technical capabilities.
  2. Interoperability: Support and empower collaboratives to drive native vendor integration and data exchange to/from key applications, using data in secure ecosystems within LEAs, across LEAs, and with SEAs where applicable.
  3. Reporting: Enhance the ability of collaboratives to provide useful data tools to LEA members for analytics, reporting, and data visualization, including downstream uses such as state accountability reporting when applicable.
  4. Impact: Harness collaboratives' abilities to impact the whole Ed-Fi community through increased LEA adoption, field feedback and adoption of new releases and versions, testing

   Five initial focus areas have been determined by the Work Group:

  1. Collect and inventory current use cases, extensions, member and pipeline growth data. (Q1-ongoing)
  2. Create a backlog of requests, needs, and supports across collaboratives, and prioritize them. (Q2 to create backlog, Q2-ongoing to populate it)
  3.    Discuss, validate, and form recommendations on priority topics in 2021 targeting reduction of cost and variation (field validation of LEA use cases & starter kits, LEA/SEA alignment) and current field issues such as attendance modality. (Q2-Q3)
  4. Identify enablers, growth blockers, and common data pain points for collaboratives; add to backlog  and to draft 2022 goals. (Q2-Q3)
  5. Create a repository of examples and artifacts others may use (e.g. pricing models, support systems/staffing, and health metrics) for existing and new collaboratives to support sustainability and growth goals. (Q3)
  • There was a question about whether there should be a crossover member to connect SEA, LEA and Collaborative Work Groups. SPED has drafted a liaison subgroup that will follow what is going on the other work groups and provide their input on crossover SPED issues as needed. Also Ed-Fi Liaisons including Maureen and Sean are actively sharing work and information that impact other work groups. The goal is to bring cross-conversations back to the community as a whole.

SEA Work Group Charter presented by Debbie Dailey. The Work Group is focusing on SEA collaboration for Ed-Fi technology and interoperability across SEA systems and synchronization with LEA priorities.  They are prioritizing use cases and aligning priorities.  Membership is limited to SEA staff. The Work Group goals include:

  1. Prioritization process: Continue the SEA Collaboration Practice for identifying potential Ed-Fi data model and technology enhancements to address SEA needs and pain points to positively impact student achievement.
  2. Improved interoperability: Enhance the ability to integrate systems like Assessment, Special Education, Early Childhood, etc. and share data in a secure ecosystem.
  3. Synchronize SEA and LEA data requests: reduce variation and drive discussions collaboratively among LEAs, SEAs and SISs using established approaches and emerging use cases such as learning modality, digital equity, etc. 


Health Metrics

Good overall attendance. Added TAG to the metrics this year.  A question was raised for vendors about what status vendors need to join work groups. They need to be Ed-Fi Community members (a self-service sign-up process).

Agenda Item #2: External / Related Initiatives

Ed-Fi & CEDS overlaps

Dean posed questions about how best to stay aware of initiatives outside Ed-Fi community – like the CEDS API discussions among SEAs? Where/how do Ed-Fi Community members become aware and create alignment with such other initiatives? Who/how to connect to others working to achieve these interoperability goals? The next agenda item began to address these.

Bringing together disparate interoperability efforts

Jami shared the current state with districts and states in various places re the awareness of interoperability, identifying their problems that interoperability can address and their abilities/organizational capacity to connect solutions to the problems that can be solved.

Several organizations are working on interoperability better connections/communication.

Organizations on the above slide are raising awareness and helping to get vendors and orgs implementation ready. An Implementation Work Group includes organizations with direct member access. The group’s role is to build a shared picture of skills needed and support organizations in their planning work. The Work Group is focused on how to (1) Define skills needed to implement interoperability, (2) Support SEA, LEA, vendor planning and (3) Facilitate peer learning. Project Unicorn (InnovateEdu) is coordinating input from a 23 member steering committee funded by BMGF and MSDF. Membership is beyond those listed such as CEDS, Ed-Fi and Data Quality Campaign.

Each organization is providing support to specific shared deliverables aligned to maturity matrix with seven domains of capabilities with core abilities needed within LEA or SEA to make their implementation successful.

 

What is the actual process of referring someone? How do you understand the organizations that do provide it and get them connected to the right program? How do we manage that and ensure follow-up? In final stages of buttoning up that referral process.  Survey launched a week ago and organizations that are participating are starting to work with districts and getting ready to activate referral process in the next couple of months.

Questions:

  1. What process makes sense to track trends and latest evolutions across efforts in the interoperability space? What role can someone like an SEA CIO play?  Across the sector for SEAs.
  2. What detail level – strategic priorities or product roadmaps – for standards bodies only and not membership orgs. Is Ed-Fi giving enough detail? 
  3. Granularity of information being shared across standards bodies is sporadic and random - not timely and not coordinated.
  4. By chat – should the member groups (CGCS) be invited to Collaboratives WG?
  5. Could TAG coordinate a recurring update on state of standards?
  6. CIOs are the customers – they should demand that these organizations share what they are doing in regular update sessions (quarterly?). They are in the best position to bring about better information sharing – there was agreement.  Bring up in CIO network.
  7. Handout of standards and overlap that was shared a couple of years ago at Ed-Fi Summit was very helpful. State of the standards update would be helpful.
  8. Is there an LEA forum like CCSSO is to SEAs? Not that we are aware of.
  9. Can AI surface some of this – such as new data standards for grant management https://ussm.gsa.gov/fibf-gm/ from HHS and does this collide with Ed-Fi.
  10. Action item – slack channel or Project Unicorn to share among GAT what the current state of standards actions and happenings.

Agenda Item #3: End of Support for Technical Suite 2

Suite 2 around since 2015 – end support in June 2022.  When do we encourage getting off Suite 2. Communication emphasizes that no change in access to code, and ecosystem can still support (e.g., SI’s, Collaboratives, and managed provider.). Announce in July 2021 as part of roadmap update. See Meeting PPT slides for more detail.

This change affects Indiana/Debbie – would like more discussion to ensure they don’t fall through the cracks.

What does end of support mean for organizations that must continue use beyond end of support (Rosh)?  FAQ needed.

Actions – get back with Debbie and prep FAQ for next GAT.

Action Items:

  • Respond to Debbie and prep FAQ for next meeting.

Next meeting: May 27, 2021