GAT Meeting - 2021-10-28

Owned by Ann Su
Last updated: Nov 16, 2021
6 min read

Agenda

  1. GAT member rotation update - who’s cycling off and who’s joining for 2022
  2. Work group updates
  3. 2021 Community awards - nominations & voting
  4. Round Robin
  5. Ed-Fi Academy - a sneak preview

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: GAT Member Rotation Update - who’s cycling off and who’s joining for 2022

Welcome to Dr. Ted Dwyer, Chief Accountability Officer, at Pittsburgh Public Schools who is a long-time member of the Assessment Work Group and the new AWG co-chair. Also, we thank Dr. Happy Miller of Rio Rancho Public Schools and John Raub from Wisconsin DPI who are cycling off from their at-large GAT membership.

Raymond Lee from Fulton Public Schools, Dan Ralyea of the South Carolina DOE and Traci Clark at Instructure (new vendor representative) are at-large members starting in 2022.

2022 GAT MEMBERSHIP:

Agenda Item #2: Work group updates

TPDM Update - Mark

  • EPP Starter Kits v1.0 released with 2 use cases for EPPs
    • 2021 Starter Kit Cohorts
      • University of La Verne, La Fetra College, became the first to launch the Program Persistence and Diversity Starter Kit.
      • University of Missouri, St. Louis launched the Program Persistence and Diversity Starter Kit.
      • Texas A&M International became the first to launch the Clinical Experience and Performance Starter Kit.
      • Alabama A&M in the training phase of the pilot and very close to launching the Clinical Experience and Performance Starter Kit.
  • Moving TPDM entities into Ed-Fi Core
    • TPDM Comm 1.1 will soon transition to Ed-Fi Core . This will help EPPs fast track their ability to see and use the data and provide a more comprehensive view for student teaching at the individual program and cohort levels.
    • The first diagram below depicts the current TPDM (teacher prep data model) and the future state.



    • The second explains the differences between TPDM Core and TPDM Community.


RVWG Update - Rosh

Dashboards are in heavy circulation among community at large – after initial conversations WY did POC to continue to use back end (ETL) and create interface and put POC info on Exchange. Worked on revision and overhaul of dashboard approach – we are no longer using them but in gap we internally in WG looked at what community is doing with visualizations such as added to analytics middle tier and using ODS directly, so charter now includes strategies for visually data that arrives in ODS.

Several approaches – now need to look at current efforts, document best practices and emerging needs and communicate to the community. Have been doing a lot of ad hoc communication and collaboration and want to let Alliance know what is going on such as improvement to visualizations. Revised charter now under review and invite to all to join.

Agenda Item #3: 2021 Community awards - nominations & voting

  • The nomination period opened on Sept. 24 and closed Oct. 15. 
  • View list of award criteria and past award winners, here.
  • 48 nominations were received.  
  • 2021 Award Categories:  
    • Partner of the Year
    • Technical Contributor of the Year
    • Educator Interoperability Leader of the Year
    • Rookie of the Year
    • Solution of the Year
  • GAT members received instructions on voting. All votes are due in by Oct. 29th.

Agenda Item #4: Round Robin 

Chris: support for multi-year data within Ed-Fi data standard; have gotten good feedback about the issues and TAG has crafted a potential path forward; will be a session at the summit to share choices.

What else is circling around that we should be thinking about tackling?  Pain Points…

  1. John – costs of some plans with increase due to sheer volume that comes out of live environment – will need to address “unnecessary traffic coming to API” such as data base constraints hitting over and over in a 24-hour period; how to surface up reporting so we know what to address i.e., what are the bigger wins we need to address right away. Rosh agrees about the tremendous volume. There are costs and implications from service-based model.
  2. Rosh - we are seeing data into ODS from multiple sources – some use SIS, some districts use other systems, where like data is coming from multiple sources it is challenging to communicate to end user that they need to clean up their data the same way – maybe look at data order and limiting access once cleaned up to avoid a collision somewhere and vendors’ internal challenges – don’t take into account data that might have been loaded from another source (another domain in the Venn diagram)
    1. John agrees but WI is blocking at claim set level; for example, 2 charter schools in one district use different systems
    2. Jen agrees from the vendor perspective
    3. Michigan worked on profiles for underused or outgrown solutions, but it sounds like we need to look at this again
    4. Complexity at LEA level is very mismanaged and ask for them is too large (and political) rather than providing scaffolding
  3. These issues can be discussed more at the Summit.
  4. Jen – SEA vs LEA is still coming up especially with all new vendors coming into play; need to bring vendors together such as Vendor Work Group and more discussion on alignment to Ed Fi certification processes
  5. Response: Have seen success of starter kits in EPPs and visualizations. Original certification was based on dashboard use cases and we are discussing how to realign certification now but don’t want to lose momentum with state reporting/pipelines that have the dashboards but big challenge on how to figure out how to distribute the pain among the community if this is changed…how to align all this with a unified front with community led work. 

Agenda Item #5: Ed-Fi Academy - a sneak preview

The Ed-Fi Academy will be rolled out at the November Summit. The intent is to provide a “clear path to learning how to deploy interoperability in your own environment. The Academy is a series of step-by-step, bite-sized, on-demand training courses that will equip education technology leaders with the skills, tools and resources necessary to successfully deploy and use the Ed-Fi Technology Suite and Data Standard.”

The Academy will be accessed through Ed-Fi community site with three levels of depth and sophistication – level 100 is being released at the Summit.

  • Will have educator and technology tracks.
  • Can enroll with Ed-Fi Community login.
  • Has narrated slides, exercises with online workbook customized and self-paced.
  • Focused content on SEA, LEA and vendor work but it is not separated within the Academy.
  • Welcome feedback.
  • Huge thanks to Silvia for bringing all this together.
  • Expensive to maintain this over time – there are budgetary and manpower constraints.

For more information and to view the courses: edfiacademy3.wpengine.com

Summary of Action Items:

  • GAT members with any questions about the November Summit should contact Caroline.
  • Members need to submit their votes for the Community Awards.
  • Maureen will be taking over for Chris as the Ed-Fi Alliance Lead of GAT. The GAT sincerely appreciates the leadership and hard work Chris did to help the GAT mature into an effective governance body for the Ed-Fi Community.

Next meeting:   Summit Breakfast Meeting