ESA Work Group Meeting - 2024-12-13

Owned by Ann Su
Dec 13, 2024
5 min read

Participants

First Name

Last Name

Organization

Sean

Hoover

Allegheny Intermediate Unit

David

Clements

Ed-Fi Alliance

Michael

Minuto

Ed-Fi Alliance

Rachel

Holbrook

Kentucky Educational Development Corporation

Madalyn

Romano

Lower Hudson Regional Information Center

Terri

Hettenbaugh

Nebraska Educational Service Unit 6

Debra

Giles

Oregon EdNexus

Support: Ann Su, Ed-Fi Alliance (Contractor)

Agenda:

  • Vendor Support.  Discuss the vendor landscape in your area and how that helped and hurt.  What pre-work steps were successful in engaging and bringing the vendor community in line with the ESA plans.

  • Implementation best practices.  ESA members will discuss their partners, tech stack, what worked well, collaborative community (vendor, state, collabs, etc), and what they would improve next time.

Notes

  • Introductions

    • Sean - Allegheny Intermediate Unit, PA

      • Finializing proposal for Ed-Fi implementation with data hub approach

    • Ann - Ed-Fi Alliance governance support

    • Madalyn -  Lower Hudson Regional Information Center, NY

      • Regional information center

      • Experience with using different data standards

      • Want to learn about sustainability

    • Terri - Nebraska Educational Service Unit 6

      • Currently working on implementing visualization with EdGraph

      • Based on data set up almost 10 years ago, SIS in NE are required to use ODS

      • EdGraph is taking the data to build visualization

    • Mike - Ed-Fi Alliance Customer Service Team

      • Responsible for Territory A - western US

    • Rachel - Kentucky Educational Development Corporation

      • Implementing with partner

      • Building dashboard around chronic absenteeism

      • Improve attendance and help districts get more funding

    • Debra - EdNexus OR

      • Boards made up of CTO/CIOs from districts

      • Main focus is to get Ed-Fi standard used across the state

      • Piloting with 4 districts

      • Goal is to transfer student data quickly

    • David - Ed-Fi Alliance Solutions Team

      • TX, FL, NY, and other southeast states

      • And general ESA work

  • Vendor Support.  Discuss the vendor landscape in your area and how that helped and hurt.  What pre-work steps were successful in engaging and bringing the vendor community in line with the ESA plans.

    • David - when you think about the scope of the project, what types of vendors do you think you need to make your project successful?

      • Ed-Fi Alliance point of view may not have complete scope of type of vendors

      • Sean

        • Data mart or data analytics platform such as Ed-insight (on hand school) in NY

        • Madalyn - we use Educlimber, MTSS vendor

        • They are not a data provider; they are the consumer

        • Most districts already have a provider

        • What we want to help districts do is to get more values out of the platform and make integration more automatic

        • David - anything you do to help reframe the conversation?

        • Sean - districts already see that they have the data and program; they want to get more value

        • Link-it - plans to get certified

          1. Unified data backend

        • David - we had some opposite response

          1. Some data provider think they may be replaced but we can help clarify

        • We allow districts to pick which vendor they feel comfortable working with

        • We haven’t had conversation with Ed Insight yet

      • Madalyn

        • Process we have with vendors is we have mandated data warehouse; level 1, 2, 4 

        • Another group that managers SIS

        • And another ed tech team

          1. Takes data and feeds to MTSS

        • Our 2 teams do individual pulls from data lake

          1. Different pulls based on vendor needs

        • Financial sustainability prevented us continuing from continuing using Ed-Fi standard

      • Madalyn - Debra mentioned data transfer over different SIS

        • One use case is when you have a student very mobile, it takes time for the data to catch

          1. Debra - that is exactly our goal, for student to take the information with them 

            1. Setting up ODS for different districts, using EdGraph and Keen Logic to build tools for the data transfer

            2. set s of 2 districts they are setting up now

            3. One district reach out to the tool (Broker) to pull the data; the other district will release it

            4. First section is student transcript

            5. Hoping to have some live data by next month

          2. David - Texas also has a plan to use education exchange for students. Region 4 is using flow of Ed-Fi data to have a real-time version.

          3. Debra - the tool requires no data entry for sending district; receiving district just need to verify

        • Sean - curios about the receiving district, are they pulling from ODS?

          1. Debra - that is the goal

          2. John Watson in San Diego had a use case

        • Terri - Don Dailey from Keen Logic had done a “snack pack” while with Michigan DataHub

      • David - we can coordinate conversation at future meeting, e.g. invite John Watson from San Diego

      • Mike - Terri and Debra both work with KL and EdGraph, describe different type of work

        • Terri

          1. EdGraph - software as a service provider

            1. Create data lake on Azure

            2. We have ability to access the data

          2. Keen Logic - SME interoperability

            1. Help navigate process

    • David - when to engage these vendors? Any communication challenges?

      • Sean

        • We are getting vendors involved, having initial conversations, even though we are in proposal stage

        • Vendors tend to know pretty well what’s involved on their side; already have pathway set up to provide core resource for a sandbox; scale out for state report

      • David

        • We hear most about challenges for engagement with SIS

      • Sean - at a district that did local implementation; challenge was that vendor had different vision of what kind of resources is available

        • We didn’t have a clear understanding what is “core” in the certification

      • David - some state customization mandates made it difficult to handle Ed-Fi out of box

      • Terri - In NE, due to state mandate, when implemented ODS 10 years ago, required API instead of ODS (??)

      • Madalyn has a lot of external stakeholders; coordinate with NY data warehouse for interoperability

        • We started working with Ed-Fi Alliance because we were struggling with working with Food Service and Transportation

        • We support 5 student information systems

        • We couldn’t sustain with charging districts for cost of MSPs

        • For the state-wide project, we had built it internally; but it was not sustainable to maintain our own team for just 1 region; we need to collaborate with other regions

        • Unlike Texas DOE help support this, NY does not provide support

        • Sean - we are in similar situation; districts understand they can get custom visualization

          1. We need to demonstrate ability to do it for one region first before getting state support

        • Terri

          1. We had done it for state reporting purpose with grant provided by Ed-Fi Alliance

          2. In MI, they talked about return on investment, MI is funding MI DataHub

      • David

        • FLCODE is self-sufficient; FL state is very hands-off

Action Items

  • Future topics - Deeper dive into use cases

  • Ann to send poll to schedule next meeting at the end of January 2025

Next Meeting: TBD