GAT Meeting - 2022-04-28

Owned by Ann Su
May 26, 2022
4 min read

Agenda

  1. Welcome
  2. Tech Congress Recap, Feedback
  3. Deep Dive: Multi-Year Data Structures
    • Discussion
  4. Community Highlight: CCSSO’s CIO Network Priorities
  5. For the good of the order

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

#2 Tech Congress Review

Roses

    • Liked the choice of topics
    • Good stratification of content for different participants
    • Utilization of Ed-Fi by others and problems encountered was helpful – begin to gather around common approach
    • Enjoyed putting faces to different names in the Community
    • A number of sessions with difficult, nuanced conversations and everyone was leaning in with their own perspective
    • Deep discussions re path forward
    • Valuable topics
    • First timers learned a lot
    • Good message about challenges and difficulty level of Ed-Fi
    • Great to be able to see everyone and talk face to face


Thorns

    • Camera did not know where to go - did not pan to see everyone speaking
    • During the plenary enjoyed conversation but second plenary moved into voting concept and some voices were not quite heard - personal preference would have preferred an online voting and less debating/lobbying
    • Not having brought computers or other devices to respond to the questions and opportunities for input
    • Still struggle with some session descriptions - most of time spent on presentations and only 10 minutes discussion - more prework/sharing of what will be covered
    • More sessions than I was able to attend - competing sessions at once
    • Challenge of taking more people is budget, travel policy limitations, unwillingness to travel, low number of staff focused on Ed-Fi
    • For some topics 45 minutes is not long enough to tee up and get into a good discussion - willing to start earlier or stay later to have longer sessions
    • Virtual option can be difficult, but it would be good to have the opportunity for those who attended to view sessions after the event –

NOTE: recordings are being posted to the platform

#3 Deep Dive into Multi-Year Data Structures

  • Slide:  Ed-Fi will recommend industry best practices which is to handle multi-year analytics downstream of any current-year operational system.
  • Ed-Fi Alliance Guidance: Implementers should use the ODS for single year data collection, regardless pf PDS deployment mode used.
    • The Driving Reasons:
      • Vendor data integration issues in second year and beyond
      • Data over-writes in second year and beyond
      • Query performance issues
      • Inability to pick up new releases without complex and possibly risky data migrations
      • Can create additional complexity for data analysis
      • General misalignment with industry best practice in data management
    • INsite has both single year and multi-year districts but write queries that do separate database years. For interactions with districts, having single year ODS information to explain - when it comes time to upgrade will not be loading multi-year. Used multi-year for New Mexico districts but those areas are without school year support and ran into challenges in particular in staff domain and giving access to a particular student for a specific time. Need school year designations to do this - historical staff data in model is hard for vendor and for usage. We are migrating to single year ODS. For example, hundreds of millions of rows of assessment data records and costly in needed resources and time-consuming to get that done. Will leverage interesting new options coming out. Going to single year ODS will help with ongoing maintenance and efficiency. 
  • What does Community need to move forward – Additional Member Comments:
    • For state with single SIS statewide, there is a difference between Operations and Reporting - is it an operations or reporting change? The single year ODS is best suited to Operations and Reporting takes a negative seat. Negative impact of multi-year was just too high for Operations.
    • It does increase the maintenance cost in Operations.
    • There are now a lot of tools to help on Analytics side

#4 Community Highlight

  • Dean Folkers
    • CCSSO (Council of Chief State School Officers) CIO Network Update
      • 42 Members in the CIO Network
    •  Priority area to be covered during upcoming EIMAC
      • Cybersecurity and privacy (including Chief Privacy Officer)
      • Modernization and interoperability
      • Digital Equity - each state is required to develop a DE plan
      • Sustainability and Governance - Great Resignation/Great Reshuffling; funding models?
    • For all 4 priorities outlined above an overarching P20W is coming to fruition - all the pieces working together (need and desire) to collaborate and adopt something in common

Next Steps

  • The upcoming Summit will be the tenth anniversary of the first Ed-Fi Summit – keep posted for more information
  • GAT discussion next steps
    • Catalog use cases so there is a foundation for the community ask.
      • Without a foundation of what data we collectively need and why, requests will continue to be diverse, and agencies frustrated
      • There is work to be done here in terms of how, level of data, etc.
      • Clarify that state data needs are often driven by and complicated by policy and legislative mandate, and so will necessarily vary. But also state that the goal is for state to use the “core foundational data” where possible.
    • Reorganize specification efforts around local operational data
      • TAG to review ways to do this

Next meeting: