SWG 2023-05-18 Meeting

Participation

The meeting was held 2023-05-18  1:00Pm -2:00pm CT via WebEx

Meeting materials

• Wisconsin DPI Presentation link 

Link to Meeting Recording

Agenda and Notes

• TEA: How are other states onboarding districts & supporting the ESA to support the districts?
  • WI DPI presented their Customer Support Model and demonstrated the Ed-Fi Credential Application for onboarding their districts and vendors. – here is the link to the deck - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14GT0YPOR8gCzL53sfj6ERtqhDd7LkZwbl1q8RFmRodw/edit?usp=sharing
    • Gabrielle Koontz, Director of IT Customer Support
      1. Customer Support Model
    • Jaidaa Shafaei, Product Owner
      1. Live Demo (see meeting recording for details)
         1. Ed-Fi Credential Application
         2. Info for Vendors - Ed-Fi Integration
      2. WI has three full time staff for support – see slides – and then can escalate if needed to other DPI teams for specific support issues. Promote “Help yourself” as much as possible with template responses built in for common issues.
      3. Created “Vendor Relations Manager” - goes between customer service support and SIS vendor issues that are impacting schools.
      4. Weekly WISE User Group calls and monthly new user training sessions are key to ongoing support.
    • Ed-Fi credential application – can login as agency or administrator; for an LEA they see one page - vendor subscription with different vendors listed with type of access and what can be edited along with key and secret and API credentials. Will encrypt secret if vendor submitted through API – can reset if needed with new secret and update with vendor; modify such as vendor ending in a specific year or can completely remove/unsubscribe a vendor.
    • A new school (or one using a new vendor) can select from a list of WI vendors – will not show vendors that have not integrated with WISE. We set up vendors with credentials and claimsets based on what they should have access to and the key in secret will be created. Automatic message to vendors to login to get key in secret. The display contains schools and school IDs for each vendor. Vendor has a profile page with URLs.
    • School district, application name, key in secret and details of specific claimset and their authorization (what they can see, edit…) and sandbox information and more information about Level 1 and Level 2 validations (LEA monitoring page) with some validation messages and data issues – all API errors within last 24 hours and level 2 validations and additional identifying information and more details.
    • LEAs see a different view of the information with L1 and L2 with more detail than vendors receive. Other grids to help vendors with their customer support such as SPED, discipline and such – show which schools have not sent in what data. Vendors can see by school their contact information. Each vendor can also add resources for districts that use that vendor – name of resource and description. Links to user guide within WISE data portal.

• • Q&A
    1. EA - Is that just counts of API error Codes or actual API error messages?
       1. WI- It has the count plus the message- not the full error stack trace
       2. EA - Gotcha; In my head I heard that as an error message=faulty JSON which was going to be a lot of questions :)
    2. EA - Are you interpreting API error messages anyways on vendor side credential application?
       1. Translating into user-friendly
       2. Jaidaa
          1. Some yes, some are cryptic
          2. Done for some L1 but not all
          3. Audrey - ones coming out of Ed-Fi core code are less; our owns are custom and more detailed
       3. L2 level errors captured on a different slide
    3. SC - How are CESA supported - LEA funded?
       1. Independently funded, supported by SEA/LEAs/both depending on contracts for various deliverables
       2. Used in a variety of ways such as bulk orders for computers
       3. Special Ed have separate contracts
       4. Model is mature but still evolving
    4. Kathleen - Do you store both successful transactions and errors, or just errors?
       1. WI - log in count of successful transaction, and a count of transaction in error, log more details for some of the errors
       2. EA - Did you make mods to the log4net parameters to get that additional data?
          1. WI - we added an additional action filter to do the aggregating and then updated log4net to do the actual logging
          2. EA - @audrey is that shareable?
          3. WI - I'd have to look if it is something I can separate out from our other modifications
    5. Sayee - CESA
       1. Does the SEA contract include people resources or just tier-1 support
          1. WI - specify deliverable, not # of people; will share what they use with Sayee
       2. Annual contract
          1. SEA hosts all events except Fall one
       3. MN - I would be interested in those deliverables, too
       4. WI - If I can ever get my public GitHub repo approved, it will be
       5. EA - Insite has some log4net mods that we'd be happy to share out too
    6. TEA - Weekly group call - anyone can log in to call?
       1. WI - yes

• Maureen - Which SEAs are submitting letter of intent for SLDS Grant? What might the priorities look like and what support can the Alliance provide?
  • Georgia will apply; infrastructure is a priority.
    1. We will add the $250K request and would want to contribute to the Ed-Fi + CEDS work.
  • MN is a definite maybe (under discussion)
  • NE is submitting.
    1. I don't have the full list but know it contains our portal/login/SSO and refining dashboard and unique identity apps
  • IN likely to apply
• SEA Playbook - we can distribute and review at next SWG meeting.
• Sayee - What was the feedback from the LEAs to the KBAs?
  • Audrey - They appreciated the parts with the examples, embedded right in their white data screen. They can provide feedback to us
  • Jaidaa - Vendors love the KBAs! They use them to answer customers' tickets.

• WI wants to know how other states are collecting data on shortened school day specifically (as tied to an IEP) - https://dpi.wi.gov/sped/laws-procedures-bulletins/bulletins/14-03
  • IN - Taken approach if in IEP only in school for x-hour which is considered as a day; we do not collect if time is reduced.
  • EA - NM is collecting extended days info but not shortened day info
    1. School specific calendars
    2. V3 can extend down to student level, to calendar day
  • NE
    1. we also aren't collecting specific info about the modified day for them, they would still be in a calendar for a 1.0 day no matter how long their full day is
    2. assuming that represents the full amount of time they spend receiving instruction
  • Jaidaa
    1. Is Ed-Fi open to extending student special ed association extension?
    2. Sayee - yes, we will look into the extension.

Next meeting: 6/1/2023 1:00-2:15PM CT

Last Update: 24 May 2023