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GAT Meeting - 2022-03-24

GAT Meeting - 2022-03-24

Apr 28, 2022

Agenda

  1. Deep Dive - Preview of the Tech Roadmap

Refer to the PPT (which can be found ) 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 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:  Apr 6, 2022 at Tech Congress