ESA Work Group Meeting - 2024-10-25
- Ann Su
Participants
Agenda:
ESA Sustainability round table. ESA members will discuss how they planned for sustainability, what challenges they faced, and what worked best for them to achieve their planning.
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.
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.
Notes
Introduction
Mike - CTS Manager
ESA Sustainability round table. ESA members will discuss how they planned for sustainability, what challenges they faced, and what worked best for them to achieve their planning.
Mike - Ed-Fi found it important to not have just technical, but also funding to sustain the implementation
Rachel
Just started our project
Interested to learn about sustainability, how you started and things along the way
Sean
Currently in planning phase
Same as Rachel, interested in sustainability, reality and changes made
Katie
We are grant funded, have another year with funding
Interested to hear how to handle at end of grant period
June
Biggest challenges, we had a strong model, but the SIS updates with various vendors have been a lot harder, which caused retention problem
Suggestions
As you have vendor relationship, they may want to test in your districts, undermine perception of solution
Set expectation with schools and districts, who tend to do their own roster update; need technology to have data in the system
Need to be super proactive in keeping system live, and aggressive communications
Different SIS vendor have different processes in moving data in, some better
If you have funding, encourage SIS to update the student records, make sure the utility is useful
District need to do the data quality fixing
One mistake in our design process - roster was replaced, made the system look broken
Mike
Critical for districts and vendors to communicate
Drive milestones for each district, e.g. data validation
Letty
From technical perspective
Building a whole ecosystem that is Ed-Fi compliant, we had 10 partners, building our solution
Because of the size and number of vendors, we had a lot of different ways people used
Made it more difficult for sustainability
Need to make sure vendors are approved for building our solutions
We had formal document that has approved technology, followed about 50%, half vendors rolled off, a few remain, less people working on it
Gave to vendor partner that had the best process
Important to be flexible, as you don’t understand all the complexity upfront
How to complete the knowledge transfer as vendors roll off - with documentation and videos
So that remaining 10-12 people at the Exchange can maintain it
From organization perspective
Important partner bring quality assurance person, and we have the same position internally
Adoption is important, it was not as easy as we had thought
Thought people would immediately understand the solution
There are some strategies to help with that
Texas CEO of Information System had idea to partner with the Exchange
Because they are non-profit, they had functionally in the backlog that they couldn’t build
It was a win for their users to match with us, since we had functionality that their users can use right away
It was win for us since we were able to get 75% of Texas to use the Exchange
From the very beginning, at contracting phase, it needs to be clear up front who owns the intellectual property being built, if there is going to be licensing fee to use
Need a technical attorney to review the technical contract
Sean - please clarify what is being built?
Letty - we have about 10 products
Interface with our product is behind the architecture, a bit confusing who owns it
Rachel - how is the licensing fee based
Letty - we got 2 grants, so it’s fee for now; we will charge a fee per student (low cost for district); district gets access to the entire Exchange
2 products fee based after the grant period
Rachel - we also have grant, so it’s free for districts for now
Do you have feedback from districts about being charged a fee?
June - our districts view our products as vendor products, districts had budget set aside for for-profit products
June Marcel 10/25/2024 2:25 PM • https://www.studentcenteredreporting.org/pricing
Districts had concerns about quality and service they can expect
Rachel - is your membership fee just for the ESA?
June - just for the type of work related to Ed-Fi, we do not have an ESA in CO
Jay
We’ve been funded with a grant fund in SC. We are starting very low dues (subsidized this year)
Goal is to get into their financing system as a vendor
Due to help us keep building our services
We don’t expect the due to increase significantly, but we will need to bring on additional resources
To the extent possible, get multiple revenue stream, including state funding; providing services in a traditional model
We just put our first draft proposal out for service and training; got our first client next week
Letty
If you have Ed-Fi ODS, any vendor can plug in, then they will pay a fee
Katie
We are doing fee on a per student basis
Still in the process of defining how it would look like
Roster data will stay free for the grant period
Thought of integrating with Exchange and SSO and charging a fee
CCMR reporting
Katie - CCMR Insight on the Exchange
Mike - you actually have funding for a house built for the implementation for that use case by districts
May be another funding other states can think about
Bill - FLCODE
We don’t have DOE support; grass-root effort; board of volunteers, mostly CIOs, to get things started; have grant at this very beginning stage
Would like to learn more about the Exchange
Use seed funding to get people join FLCODE
Goal is to work on use cases and build solutions for a repository available to other districts
Main SIS vendors in FL are Focus and Skyward who are Ed-Fi compliant
Letty
The Exchange is a suite of products that are Ed-Fi compliant
Districts can launch the different products for their analytic tools via the ODS
Can extract files, e.g. roster data, to feed into other systems
Bill
Interested in learning everyone’s status, approach
Jay - SC data governance
Started as partner with state DOE and district
Incorporated as a non-profit
Advantage is get discounts
State department was the driving force for creating our group
We are in the position of providing data governance and district support; unlike other ESAs
We translate for both sides, connecting state to the district and resources
Letty
We were funded by the state at the beginning
We do state reporting
The Exchange, with support from Ed-Fi, stood up our state reporting
We also received grant from another non-profit
We are a department under the region, but we get funding from the state
Rachel
In Kentucky
We have 8 collabs
Non-profits, no funding from state
Goal is to bring all districts on board
Potential get support from the state if we can show that we have good data
We had kick off of our project in September, invited stakeholders to kick-off meeting, showcase chronic absenteeism reporting
Create dashboard to show students with chronic absences
Bring all data into one place; all vendors are Ed-Fi compliant
Sean
Want to get someone from the state DOE to see benefits
Which domains are state CIO looking for?
Rachel - attendance
Districts were losing funding due to absences; our reporting can help district track
Michael Minuto - Please be sure to join the Ed-Fi ESA Community Group on our community portal at the link below. You can use this to stay in touch with each other between meetings:
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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.
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.