GAT Meeting - 2019-6-13

Owned by Chris Moffatt (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jun 20, 2019
4 min read

Agenda

  1. Finalize proposed changes to Ed-Fi Certification
  2. Review of proposed Finance API from Finance WG
  3. Health Metrics
  4. Work group updates
  5. Governance activities at the Ed-Fi Summit

 Link to meeting PPT

Participation

Members:

Support:

Meeting Minutes

Proposed Changes to Ed-Fi Certification

Eric Jansson reviewed the proposed refinements to Ed-Fi certification as follow-on to the discussion at the 5-23-2019 GAT meeting and a subsequent meeting of a subgroup of the GAT to discuss open questions.  Following are the certification changes that the GAT reviewed and approved during the 6-13 meeting:

  • Customer references
    • Require 3 customer verifications from LEA's, 1 of which is provided prior to technical certification,  the other 2 within the next 6 months.
    • Require that the verifying LEAs control both the providing and receiving system (i.e. exclude state reporting or similar use cases).
    • Require the agency to be part of the Ed-Fi community
    • For the customer verification, publish the customer agency but omit the agency contact person.
    • Provide a standard customer verification statement.
    • Verifications can be based on either a production or pilot implementation, and are encouraged, but not required, to be from different geographies/states.
    • Waivers will be allowed as specialized use cases for providers unable to provide three district verifications.
  • Additional information to be provided as part of certification
    • The certification record should provide links to additional information that can be optionally supplied by the certifying vendor, such as details of what data fields are mapped and supplied as part of the integration. 
    • Require the vendor to declare as part of certification the geographies and versions (or combinations of those) where the verified functionality is available, and publish this information on the certification page.
    • The certification record should indicate whether or not the certified provider charges fees to the certified functionality.  
  • Other certification sites (i.e. state certification sites) will be allowed to have links on the Ed-Fi certification page to incorporate information from SEA certifications.

Conclusion

The GAT approved the recommendations and agreed to provide vendors 1 calendar quarter of notice.

Finance RFC

The draft Finance RFC was discussed, noting that this is the first standards proposal to go through the governance process.  The RFC has undergone review by participating states (AZ, WI), NEFEC and representative school districts from those states. Reviewers have confirmed that the RFC meets the requirements of their use cases.  Financial software service providers in those states have also had opportunities to review the RFC.  The proposed additions are additive and present no breaking changes.  The GAT approved sending the Finance RFC to the Executive Committee for approval, at which point it will be published an an Ed-Fi RFC, for comment by the Ed-Fi Community. 

Action:

The GAT has until June 18 to review the RFC and provide additional comments. 

Conclusion

The RFC is recommended by the GAT for approval by the Executive Committee, for publication as an Ed-Fi RFC. See  GOV-3 - Getting issue details... STATUS

GAT Representation (multiple reps from same organization)

The GAT agreed that it is permissible to have multiple representatives from the same organization when this was needed in order to have appropriate expertise or work group representation.  It was agreed that in such cases the organization would be limited to one vote.  

Health Metrics

Rick Rozzelle reviewed the health metrics and the status of the 3 fully-chartered work groups for each measure.  The red status for AWG cadence drew some discussion.  It was felt that using the generation of RFCs as the sole indicator of cadence (i.e. ongoing work group productivity) was too narrowly focused.  Work groups have created use cases and coalition processes that were representative of a productive work group and this work is not represented in the current health metric. 

Action:

Consider changes to the health metrics (specifically to the cadence metric) that includes other tangible work group outputs presented to GAT, in addition to RFCs, such as use cases or processes. 

Work Group Updates

Assessment Work Group

Dean Folkers provided an update on the 3 subgroups of the AWG, explaining the history behind the 3 subgroups and the latest activity of use case development and technical review led by Eric Jansson to prepare for the issuance of an RFC.  The RFC will address such things as tool-usage data, cross-referencing learning standards and social-emotional learning (SEL).  

Finance Work Group

John Raub provided an update that included status of the finance software provider work to develop toward version 3 of the finance specification. 

Reporting and Visualization Work Group

Billy Buchanan suggested that the RVWG charter needs adjusting to reflect recent directions taken by the group to focus on hands-on development. Universities are being afforded opportunities to prototype zero-cost reporting alternatives.  Use cases will drive the prototyping.  Use cases will likely not be solely classroom focused, to allow for other district-level value-add visualizations.

Special Education Work Group

Chris noted that the SPED group is being formed and the charter is out for comment. The group so far has about 15 members.  Their initial focus is prioritizing use cases to develop and researching SPED-related privacy issues. 

Teacher Preparation Work Group

Nancy Smith discussed briefly the 3 pilots that are under development. The TPDM charter is out for comment.  The TPDM Work Group had about 20 participants in the first session.  They will be looking for a chair person soon.  It was noted that TPDM is a large data model and it is doubtful that any one organization will implement the full model in an initial implementation - need to be able to support phased implementations. 

It was also noted that survey is part of the TPDM data model, which is relevant to the SEL and other survey discussions held by the AWG.  Including surveys in the Ed-Fi core deserves further discussion.

Ed-Fi Summit

Work Group meetings will be held on September 29 from 3 to 5 pm.  The GAT will meet on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning during the Summit.