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TAG Meeting 2022-06-16

TAG Meeting 2022-06-16

Jun 20, 2022

Participants

First Name

Last Name

Organization

Marcos

Alcozer

Ed-Fi Alliance

Josh

Bergman

Skyward

David

Clements

Ed-Fi Alliance

Betsy

Conti

Denver Public Schools

Wyatt

Cothran

South Carolina Department of Education

Matt

Criscenzo

Indiana University INsite

Rosh

Dhanawade

Education Analytics

Katie

Favara

Texas Education Agency

Stephen

Fuqua

Ed-Fi Alliance

Jean-Francois

Guertin

EdWire

Eric

Jansson

Ed-Fi Alliance

Erik

Joranlien

Ed Analytics

Oscar

Ortega

Edupoint

Jeremy

Perkins

Instructure

Doug

Quinton

PowerSchool

Andrew

Rice

Education Analytics

Lucy

Saura

Lake Washington School District

Audrey

Shay

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

Molly

Stewart

Indiana University INsite

Agenda

  1. Update on breaking changes / API evolution (including communication of data model changes)

  2. AMT direction (including API-first strategy)

Materials

Notes

Topic 1: API Evolution

There was a general agreement that some plan was needed and that something that resembled this was a good answer to those needs.

  • Would LEAs update on every 2 years - seems overly optimistic. Maybe this need to be longer.

  • Could result in managed providers supporting 2 production versions and possibly 1-2 dev versions.  The number of prod versions could be longer if updates were not consumed and agencies stayed on older versions.

  • States commonly need to maintain 3 versions, 1 current and 2 historical

  • The discovery/metadata URL likely needs to be standardized as well, particularly given this change and breaking changes.

  • API fragmentation is not are not a new problem, but introducing breaking changes could make it worse by providing breaks in the core standard.

  • Introducing versions of subsets of the API could be helpful.

  • Decoupling API code and ODS versions could be helpful for providers by allowing them to maintain the same ODS features while evolving the API.

Topic 2: API-first and AMT discussion

General strong agreement that API-first should be the model for analytics, and not direct SQL access. Some reasons were re-cited, but the meeting did not attempt to re-list all of them or review this general direction. Most comments focused on other aspects of this work:

  • Is the expectation to have bulk end-point with JSON from other APIs? Goal is not to change the current API; this is just a tool which may leverage existing tools and move data from the API to fill the data lake

  • Discussion of how extensions should work in this model.

  • Discussion of adding event-driven processes for GETs: Streaming data out of the ODS/API into Kafka or another message queue as events that can be handled in realtime, instead of needing to extract data from either the API or the database.

  • Some discussion of who would use this architecture and if it is therefore worth it to spend Ed-Fi development resources to build it. Several points

    • Seen as too complex for most local education agencies: difficulty for agencies to access the skill set for some of this. There were some counter-examples of smaller districts developing capabilities cited.

    • Such an architectural reference point might be useful for newer providers or large urbans, and that generally capability with data management and analysis was increasing for agencies.

    • A fully deployable architecture might be expensive: are there other aspects of the Ed-Fi roadmap that could use the focus instead of this.

    • EA mentioned that they are releasing a version of this under an open license as well that could play the role of organizing community activity.

    • The Alliance is looking to better document the core use cases that drive Ed-Fi, and that a reference architecture provides a way to do that in code.

    • Some discussion of the possible technical candidates for the various parts of the proposed reference architecture and project.