GAT Meeting - 2022-03-24

Owned by Ann Su (Unlicensed)
Apr 28, 2022

Agenda

  1. Deep Dive - Preview of the Tech Roadmap

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 Maureen.

Participation

Members:

Support:

Meeting Minutes

Eric Jansson provided an overview of the developing Ed-Fi Roadmap, requested GAT members’ input and responded to their questions. He shared:

  1. Priorities – Shifts
  2. Priorities – Sustained Investment
  3. Lower / Declining Priority
  4. Gaps / Areas to Address

The meeting PPT contains the details of each area.

GAT members’ discussion covered:

  • High volume resources such as course transcript, grades, gradebook data – best practices or better tooling
  • Dealing with “to extend or not to extend” and framework of having that conversation with LEAs; experiencing LEAs who want to do all things and want to report on it and it doesn’t fit in the model – do we extend or not – want to have conversations with LEAs re collecting a new piece of data and holding up against standard model and if it doesn’t – how can we think through and discuss in a disciplined, structured way in meetings with LEASs around the data they want to collect – want to be involved early in the conversation – does it fit in the standard model and if not, where does that lead? How to conduct conversation to steer them to standard model?
  • It should be part of that same discussion; because it directly impacts vendors and their ability to serve up that data via ed-fi
  • CEDS and connections/opportunities for roadmap – how do those things come together and collaborate?

There is interest in creating a standard for education similar to health care industry - Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) - per Eric they have done fairly extensive research into FHIR - question from Troy: should we bring an exec summary of that research to this group?

Ed-Fi Technology Roadmap on website is product release roadmap but does not provide high level picture of major tech investments.

Priorities – Shifts

  • Moving away from ODS as a multi-year store and API as multi-year but have new needs of patterns for multi-year analytics (see detailed rationale at weblink)
  • Support for deploying ODS at scale
  • API and data model breaking changes – selecting gradebook/grade, finance and assessment

Priorities – Sustained Investments

  • Starter Kits
  • Analytics Middle Tier
  • EDFacts reporting
  • Docker deployment
  • LMS data investment - still early but nurturing
    • LMS Toolkit (mainly data around assignments)
    • LMS API – vendor integration

Low/Declining Priorities

  • Data migration tool
  • MappingEDU - being sunset
  • Sample Data Generator

Gaps/Areas to Address  Did not show or discuss this slide.

Continued group discussion:

An alternative strategy is to have a healthy marketplace of analytic solutions – starter kits are competing with market solutions. Focus will be on ODS and API being awesome. Analytics middle tier - very context driven and will be challenging for the Alliance to do well with

A strong effort to fill void in marketplace but some like chronic absenteeism have so much flexibility out there in states so not a quick win starter kit. Suggestions made to tunnel down on ones that are universal and have very little complexity in the marketplace – be more focused.

Starter kit strategy – be able to grow adoption of community faster and develop quick wins; completely deployable for now but can evolve. The starter kits have been coalescing the community conversation around biggest challenges and priorities and what data is needed/dependent on that -having dialogue that gets built back into standards and technical stack.

Tech Congress will have session on analytics middle tier and use case metrics - more useful collateral for starter kits.

Next Steps

Next meeting:   at Tech Congress