TAG Meeting 2021-11-15

Attendees

First NameLast NameOrganization
DavidClementsEd-Fi Alliance
Rosh  DhanawadeIndiana University INsite
MindyDuFaultInfinite Campus
LaQuintaExtineLeon County Schools
StephenFuquaEd-Fi Alliance
Jean-Francois  GuertinEdWire
JasonHoekstraEd-Fi Alliance
EricJanssonEd-Fi Alliance
VinayaMayyaEd-Fi Alliance
ChrisMoffattEd-Fi Alliance
HeatherPottsEctor County ISD
DougQuintonPowerSchool
DanielRalyeaSouth Carolina Department of Education
MaxReinerNebraska Department of Education
AndrewRiceEducation Analytics
JimRobertsonPowerSchool
AudreyShayWisconsin Department of Public Instruction
GrishmaShresthaInfinite Campus
SayeeSrinivasanEd-Fi Alliance
JohnWatsonSan Diego County Office of Education
PatrickYohoInnovateEDU Inc

Agenda

  1. Re-anchoring certification
    1. Improving certification is a consistent theme in the community (and was a topic selected by the TAG for discussion last summer), and often what is meant is that an organization is not receiving the data it expects. But what data should be the expectation? As a community, how do we define that?
  2. Multi-year vs single-year data management and analytics
    1. Results of community survey - see TAG Meeting 2021-10-21 - Deployment Models Survey
    2. Further analysis and discussion of enabling the community
  3. Data out improvements broadly, including API performance

Offline topic: review  topic “Outcomes / Status of Data Model Issues Raised by TAG” - see the summary TAG Meeting 2021-10-21 - Data Model Issues Raised by TAG

  • TAG Members to read the summary and raise and raise any specific issues or suggestions for action.

Materials

Notes

Re-anchoring certification

There was significant confusion about what certification was and meant.

  • States generally want to see it as assurance that the provider can do the technical work to use the API, and not so much a guarantee of access to specific data (example problems raise: order of data, authorization, overposting)
  • LEAs want to see it as "plug-and-play" to get specific a data, but are often frustrated when there are gaps in items they want

The Alliance explained that the intended purpose was to assert specific data availability, on behalf of LEAs who could not otherwise easily represent their needs. And that the target was not to support SEAs, as SEAs today can force vendor compliance without outside help.

One key challenge is that in state and LEA data are a problem -  state looks very different.

Sometimes a vendor is certified, yet the vendor can't provide the entire API/data in some geography (example was New Mexico)

Multi-year vs single-year data collections survey outcomes

Results of community survey presented

Little discussion / no pivots from prior TAG advice to do single year collections/ODS
 
Data out improvements broadly, including API performance

Question: should we be using the API or the database? One member strongly recommended that the API is the way to go

Question: what are performance benchmarks? One recommendation of 25 K transactions per minute

Question: should be build aggregate APIs for data out or use a single "granular" API?

Need to understand the use cases better - Action: Eric to collect these for the next meeting

One agency reported a 1:10 ratio of calls for data in vs data out 

One need: larger sample data set for testing