Ed-Fi

Alliance and Community

The Ed-Fi Alliance is a “group of educators, technologists, and thought leaders shaping the future of education technology through the Ed-Fi Data Standard and the ecosystem of Ed-Fi Technologies."

“As a nonprofit organization funded by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, our alliance takes a mission-driven, stable, and long-term approach, independent from shifting government priorities.” ([1])

The Alliance represents the organization that develops and stewards the Ed-Fi standard and leads the Ed-Fi Community.

Ed-Fi.org describes the Ed-Fi Community as: “Bringing together a variety of stakeholders — including educators, superintendents, consultants, and educational technology developers — the Ed-Fi Community regularly contributes feedback that helps the Ed-Fi Data Standard and technology suite grow more usable, practical, and sophisticated. Working closely with Ed-Fi’s staff, these contributors form the heart of the Ed-Fi Alliance Community.” ([2])

The Ed-Fi community functions as a user group that provides input and feedback on the Ed-Fi standard and the technical solutions the organization builds and provides.

Standard

The Ed-Fi Standard is useful for data transport and storage for data use in the K-12 sector.

It supports interoperability between various applications that education organizations might use to support their education systems and their organizational operations. For example, one use case for the Ed-Fi standard might be to enable integration from systems of record, such as a Student Information System, with an assessment system, and a learning management system, so those data can move, securely, throughout the education organization’s technical infrastructure. This also enables these data to be available in the classroom for educators to make informed decisions and thus improve student outcomes.

This enables users, educators, and decision-makers alike, to have a more complete picture of the students they work with, so they can inform their practices with the data their organization has available across its data systems. To learn more, see [3].

Tools

The Ed-Fi Tool suite was developed by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation to assist in improving student achievement in the K-12 education sector. It includes such technologies as:

• An operational data store and API: The Ed-Fi Operational Data Store (ODS) integrates and stores data from several applications while the API enables developers to create, read and update data that are stored in the ODS.

• An analytics middle tier: The middle tier represents a set of views or analytic tables that have been built over the ODS tables/API. This tier allows users to build reporting tools from the data that are stored in the ODS.

• Admin App: The admin app is the application that enables administration of the Ed-Fi ODS

• Data import: The data import tool enables users to load their data in CSV format into an Ed-Fi ODS/API.

• Ed-Fi Exchange: Users can share solutions to the Ed-Fi Exchange. Other Ed-Fi licensees can then download those solutions. These solutions could be things such as data standard extensions, ODS and API extensions and dashboard plug-ins. In addition, higher-level contributions such as technical white papers and implementation project overviews may be contributed to assist other licensees implementing Ed-Fi. ([4]) The exchange is a place for the Ed-Fi community to share approaches, innovations, and tools.

• MetaED IDE: This is a tool for customization. Users’ technical staff can “create new data elements and align them with your overall data architecture” using this tool. ([5])

In sum, the Ed-Fi tool suite can extract student information from a variety of education data systems and then standardize, integrate, and communicate them to educators and other parties through web-based dashboards, reports, and other applications.