Materials

Meeting Minutes

The meeting was held via WebEx from 10:00 - 11:30 am CT.

Participation

Members:

Support:

Member Updates

Satish: Arizona has a focus on upgrade to 3.0.

Stephen: Tulsa is building out connections between their dashboards and the ODS.

Tim Casey (Unlicensed): Skyward is working with Indiana and Minnesota on their pilot programs.

Governance Overview

How does a rough timeline of work group managing from idea to implementation align to work group hopes/expectations? Currently, work groups are preparing for decisions/GAT input at the Summit. The GAT (or work groups) may request assistance from the TAG.

Tracker is being customized for work flow process for the different groups. All GAT members will have full access including to all tech docs.

In reference to the Use Case subgroup within the AWG, there was discussion around the data model supporting use cases and how to prioritize when there is concurrent work going on in other projects. The idea is to select use cases that are prioritized in the community so other subgroups within the AWG (i.e. the API Adoption and Technical subgroups) can use these priorities in their work.

There are different entities working on different activities and grant efforts and it would be helpful to know across the community what work is going on, for example in assessment. This would reduce overlap and begin to address issues that are lacking support.

Community Work Group Updates

Maureen reviewed FWG progress.

There may be requests for changes to this domain as needed for ESSA. The school year being targeted for ESSA compliance is SY19-20.
By Dec. 2018, Arizona needs to have a plan on what they want to publish from a finance and accountability aspect. This is a good example of the tension there may be for a work group around problem and solution and lining up with Ed-Fi timelines.
The polling process will allow discovery of the sense of urgency and timeline concerns on a more comprehensive scale.

Eric reviewed AWG progress.

A charter has been drafted that includes overall goals and initial focus areas.
He confirmed that the Ed-Fi work stream around today’s assessment API is being run parallel to the AWG and by the summit there should be a proposal on recommended revisions.

Discussion on TAG proposal: “Decomposition of Certification”

Led by Tim and Eric – the proposal from the TAG regarding decomposition of certification was previously shared for review.

What is the appropriate way to improve the certification of vendors? We want a certification program that can be used by states (SEAs). But the core beneficiaries of a broad approach with certification (as proposed in the attachment) are LEAs and this may impact how SEAs can use it. Other domains/systems beyond SIS certification may not have this issue of needing decomposition. We currently have multiple products undergoing certification and this proposal is for SIS only.

The dilution of overall certification into multiple parts may make it difficult for LEAs. The challenge is vendors who only meet minimum certification requirements and present that they are fully certified. There appears to be market pressure with Ed-Fi to drive vendors to certify their products in the areas they support, even when their products do not cover the full range of certification data.

If the end game is to say a new LEA or SEA would look for certified vendors, what will be the effect on sites (such as Arizona) that have customized extensions and work to ensure that multiple vendors [example was 14] can comply with these extensions?

This effort should leverage and reduce costs for SEA deployment. But one question is how (if) a more mature implementation (at a state like Arizona for example) can benefit from such a new approach. Some states use the Ed-Fi certification as a baseline but not to replace their testing.

Another example is a site experiencing pain points with a vendor that became certified using their model of collecting SIS data and that approach is different from the site’s data collection methodology. This can be an issue especially with ERP systems customized to local processes and can be a deep and invasive problem with the SIS.

The discussion on decomposition ended with recommendation to send the proposal back to the TAG for further review. After further discussion on the topic amongst Alliance GAT members, we propose to continue the discussion within the GAT at the next monthly meeting, in order to provide more guidance and direction as to next steps.

Action Items

Maureen Wentworth will follow-up with Tulsa on what extensions are being considered in the finance domain.
Eric Jansson will ask Dean and Ted about visualization vs. analytics.
GAT members need to request Ed-Fi SSO login to access Governance space on TechDocs.
GAT members should review the GAT organizing charter and provide any feedback.
A request was made to create (and maintain) an inventory of assessment projects and initiatives across the Ed-Fi Community. Chris Moffatt (Deactivated) is cordinating the initial draft.
GAT needs to review work group charters for the AWG and FWG. This is likely towards the end of the year
A decision is needed on when work group charters become final – either as drafted with revision process in place or not until six months after introduction with time for input and revisions or??
Future GAT topics: How do we make progress on data push out from customizable systems?
(Additional context: Many systems in K12 are highly customizable, and this makes it difficult for vendors to comply to a data exchange standard since doing so now involves working around localized business logic. For their part, agencies want data served up and managed so as to reflect their processes, but this means that “certification” does not result in “plug and play.” Certification starts to look misleading, since it can’t account for local customization.
The proposal on decomposition of certification will be resumed at the next GAT meeting, to provide more guidance and direction on next steps on the proposal.
Request was made for future GAT discussion on visualization and dashboard disposition.
GAT members to be polled to determine best monthly GAT meeting date and time.

GAT Meeting - 2018-06-20