Wednesday, April 11, 2018
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM | Plenary Session 1 Ballroom AB Welcome and greetings from AZ DOE, summary of last year’s event, & roadmap transition to 3.0. |
These broad session notes attempt to capture the spirit of the discussion and should not be interpreted as a transcript. Although Ed-Fi Alliance staff were involved in capturing these observations, the notes below should not be construed as official, complete, or 100% accurate.
Welcoming remarks from Maureen Wentworth, Ed-Fi staff
Diane Douglas, Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dept of Education, State of Arizona
Technology #1 priority internally; externally: student achievement and stewardship of taxpayer dollars
Using Ed-Fi standard has lowered time to run critical reports, and supported the quickest year-end rollover yet last year
Next step: extend API to finance systems
Satish Pattisapu, Chief Information Officer, Dept of Education, State of Arizona
Standardization with Ed-Fi has helped reduce processing time from days to hours
Now can give instantaneous feedback to local education agencies
Significant win: able to pay schools on current year enrollment data, whereas used to pay based on prior year
Able to reduce duplication, spend less time and money supporting multiple systems
State and federal reporting in the past cut close to deadline - this year the standards implementation allowed early delivery of data
Collaborative approach with Ed-Fi community is mutually beneficial, look forward to working together to solve future needs around financial accountability and transparency, as well as assessment data interoperability
Eric Jansson, Director of Technology, Ed-Fi Alliance
Goals of the Technical Congress:
Ensure that the standards and technology are deeply embedded
Bridge the gap between the annual summits
Challenges that motivate Ed-Fi:
Traditionally, teachers get very little information about students as the school year begins, most coming from word of mouth
Teachers want to use data, but are usually left creating their own spreadsheets and manual visualizations
Goal then is to provide a 360-degree view of students: https://vimeo.com/227935391
Role of the technical congress
Get into the weeds - “propellor-head meeting”
Provide feedback on the standards - they are not set in stone
Expect a culture of participation
Agenda based on ambiguity - here to talk about things we don’t know how to do, to talk about unanswered questions (e.g. finance, assessments)
Strong turnout, but please work to be interactive
Community Norms
Themes:
Doing over talking
Practice over theory
Getting started now
Tracker (JIRA) & Tech Docs (Confluence)
Chris Moffatt, Vice President of Technology, Ed-Fi Alliance
Addressing important topics for 2018...
Versioning: introducing Ed-Fi Technical Suite for identifying each “generation of technology” - those components that share data model and are designed to work together, simplifying the understanding relative to traditional independent version numbers. See suite/versioning matrix in Tech Docs. Benefits:
Communication
Clarity of Support
Transition to Suite 3
Release Candidate 1 now available for the Data Standard and ODS API
Ed-Fi standards & tech are a treadmill, not a springboard - supports continuous work and improvement
Timeline / roadmap: RC1, agencies and vendors prep through 2018, 3.0 APIs operational 2019
Deciding between suite 2 and 3
Suite 2: If already working to deploy on the standard in 2018-2019 school year, or leveraging “quick start”, then continue with Suite 2
Suite 3: Already have suite 2 implementation, start planning for upgrade for 2019-2020 / 2020-2021, or if just beginning journey to implement the standard
Eric Jansson
Final session will include report-out from the various sessions
Will plan to document open questions and issues not covered
Darts and Laurels
Eric asked organizations to mention the biggest issues they are facing (DARTS), and to call out something that is working very well (LAURELS).
Volusia County Schools
Struggling with running the dashboards in Azure
Loading the ODS has been a pleasure, latest version of loader very fast
Challenged by non-integer school id [Eric remarked: look for open Tracker ticket on this] (Eric Jansson can you find this ticket?)
Certica Solutions
Love the momentum that Ed-Fi is getting, but
Would like to see increased pace of adoption
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Concerned about data quality & error messaging, so end-users can easily resolve own issues
Eager to workout details for finance domain
Improve on vendor certification
Education Analytics
Appreciate the welcoming to the community
eScholar
Challenged by moving from one version of the standard to another, hoping the burden will be less with next version
CELT Corporation
Working with Assessment data - pain point getting everyone to adopt
There’s been more movement to reach out to non-technical people
Eidex
Ridiculously easy to deploy the API
Struggle with (event?) management
NWEA
Exchanging data for Assessments
Tyler Technology
Dart - Section file key field volatility
Laurel - looks like there is a solution under way
Learning Mate
No darts, only laurels: versioning chart is easy to read and clear; continuing to strengthen the standard
Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency
Widespread knowledge of Ed-Fi in vendor space now
Challenge around the deltas for data exchange
PowerSchool Group LLC
Great evolution of the data spec - best solution for compliance & reporting
Achievement First
Looking forward to getting started implementing the Ed-Fi standard
Door94
Intervention model not robust yet (dart)
Getting help from the Ed-Fi staff to improve it (laurel)
SchoolZilla
Need help with change events [Eric remarked: see session on bulk data exchange]
Boston Public Schools
ODS proof-of-concept was a good experience
Interested in support of transportation
Maine Department of Education
Thank you Maureen and SEA support and for having this event in Scottsdale
ESP Solutions Group
Darts for data quality conversation
Impressed with ability to pull solutions from the Exchange [Eric remarked: Ed-Fi Exchange a site for sharing community solutions, originally developed by Arkansas]
Skyward Inc.
Took a long time to figure out why I could add but not edit a student
Hard to support level 2 errors for schools
Expansion for ESSA support
New states starting to adopt Ed-Fi is a testament to the community
Error messaging is improving through the SIG: dart to laurel. Not being developed in a vacuum
Student1
Designed to be extended, and governance process allows the standard to evolve
Everyone: if you get the urge to extend, call Eric J. Other people probably have same challenge and we should collaborate in solving these challenges
Collaborative Systems and Services
Laurel: Operationalizing a data model around ESSA
Amazon Web Services
To the Ed-Fi Alliance for helping them to get up-to-speed on the tech stack
Amazon is about choices. Would like to see more choices around technology stack, e.g. open source databases
Endpoint
New states coming on board
Every dart is already being addressed
InnovateEDU & Project Unicorn
Standards are evolving to meet the needs of states & schools
Infinite Campus
Data visibility is something we’re still striving to improve on
Being on the TAG good to see the value placed on feedback