Overview of Ed-Fi Standards and Technology

Owned by Eric Jansson
Last updated: Mar 24, 2024 by Shawn Peterson (Unlicensed)

Contents

What is the Ed-Fi Alliance?

The Ed-Fi Alliance is a publisher of data exchange standards and an open-source software community

What are the Ed-Fi Standards?

These standards allow data to move seamlessly across many domains—including assessment, enrollment, attendance, grades, demographics, etc.—which, in turn, empowers educators to improve student performance.

These standards are reflected principally as Rest API specifications implemented by education agencies. This provides external systems a common API surface to build an integration around and removes the management of custom extracts.

What software is supported by Ed-Fi Alliance?

The Ed-Fi Alliance supports the Ed-Fi Platform which consists of the Operational Data Store (ODS) and API. The Ed-Fi Platform is a software platform that many education agencies use to aggregate data across disparate domains.

Please note: The data standard and the technology that implements the standard are two separate things. Any system is welcome to implement the API specifications via different technologies.

Key Concepts

  • The Ed-Fi Data Standard is focused on classroom-level decision making to improve student outcomes.
  • The Ed-Fi Alliance is both a publisher of data exchange standards and an open-source software effort.