It is imperative to address the challenge of data interoperability in K12 education. The K12 district data ecosystems must be optimized to amplify educational processes and boost students’ learning and development. Access to high-quality, meaningful data is crucial for educators to make data-driven decisions. The educational data systems need to overcome the traditional siloes and interconnect efficiently to provide integrated access to data. Without such systems in place, educators are burdened with manually putting the pieces together themselves or lack access altogether to the necessary information.
To meet the demand for data interoperability, educational institutions are increasingly adopting the Ed-fi education solution. Data interoperability refers to a seamless, secure, and controlled data exchange between applications using data standards. It helps exchange information in real or near-real-time, enabling school districts to bring together siloed data elements boost the decision-making and learning processes. Thus, it provides opportunities to educators and administrators to make optimum use of data and position themselves better as school leaders.
The Ed-fi data standard consists of rules to streamline the data lifecycle management. The data standard emphasizes extensibility to enable individual agencies to add new entities, associations, and attributes. Since K12 is full of diverse data mandates, a single standard cannot effectively capture the diversity. The Ed-Fi solution thus allows the previously disconnected educational products to connect and efficiently come together to generate data insights and empower the stakeholders. It enables them to harness the power of data that schools collect on a daily basis.
The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation funds the Ed-Fi educational standard. It unifies the data model, application, exchange, and sample dashboard source code. Ed-Fi aligns with common education data standards. The Ed-fi initiative is experiencing significant momentum as it marks a milestone in data interoperability. It serves as the foundation to enable interoperability among secure education data systems.
Open-source
The Ed-fi solution is an open-source data standard. The technology has been developed in collaboration with the community of educators and associated professionals. It provides a suite of open-source technology, including:
- A persistent ODS to centralize data from district applications. The Operational Data Store (ODS) enables users to bring together information into a single database from several sources.
- A comprehensive education data model
- An API to enable bi-directional movement of data. The API allows applications to create, read, ad update data.
Since it is open-source, no licensing fee is required to integrate the solution into the educational software infrastructure. Thus, schools can free up their funds to invest in developing other domains. The Ed-fi Alliance comprises a community of entities from the EdTech space that includes over 250 software vendors, 32 state agencies, and about 12,000 school districts.
Components of the Ed-Fi Data Standard
UDM model: The Ed-Fi data standard is built on a Unifying Data Model (UDM). The UDM is CEDS-aligned and open-source. It defines the various entities in the standard and helps exchange, share, and analyze K–12 education data. The UDM is expressed in UML. The model helps harmonize the information model and data across Ed-Fi technology.
XML Data Exchange Framework: The framework is expressed as XML Schema Definition (XSD) files. It enables the streamlined exchange of student data between the source systems. XML can be used to populate an Ed-Fi ODS / API.
REST API Design Guidelines: It defines the design guidelines for an Ed-Fi REST API. The UDM identifies the protocols for data transfer and manipulation with the help of Ed-Fi REST API implementation.
Use cases of Ed-fi Data Standard
The Ed-fi data standard helps manage, organize, and exchange the following data:
- Student assessments, assessment results, and academic standards
- Educational organization information and hierarchy
- Calendar and schedule information
- Student grades and grade book entries student and educator attendance information
- Student discipline incidents and responses
- Student enrollment and class assignment information
- Student transcript information
- Parental contact information and student-parent relationships
Benefits of Ed-fi data standard
- The Ed-fi data standard enables schools to standardize the data systems so that they can “speak the same language.” Thus, the stakeholders can streamline the tedious process to gather and store student data.
- It helps unlock data residing in multiple systems across the platform.
- It enables the stakeholders to unify data to provide a 360° view of each student.
- The data standard enables the school leaders to leverage critical insights and make data-driven decisions. The comprehensive real-time data helps to fuel student-centered learning.
- An active community of technologists and educators takes steps to advance Ed-fi every day. Thus, it is constantly aligned to the current trends.
- The data collected, stored, and transferred is encrypted. Thus, it is protected against vulnerable cyber threats.
To Conclude:
The Ed-fi initiative leverages a secure, controlled exchange of data. It is here to bring clarity to interoperability standards to stakeholders across the education sector, radicalize and optimize education data, and use it to facilitate the growth and development of students.