Access 4 Learning (A4L)

Community

The A4L Community represents a standards-based group made up of “educational policymakers, marketplace product, and service providers, and the customers they serve, collaborating to address real world learning information and privacy issues.” (https://home.a4l.org/about-us/) A4L encompasses four different international communities: New Zealand, Australia, North America, and the United Kingdom. A4L also includes the Student Data Privacy Consortium (SDPC) as a special interest group. A4L is funded by its members. To learn more, see A4L.org.

Standard

A4L is a data transport standard, specifically the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) data standard. It provides a free, community-built data interoperability blueprint focused on the K-12 sector.

The A4L, or SIF standard, is made up of two primary components:

1. The infrastructure, or “the how,” which “defines the transport and messaging functionality over the 'wire' where payloads are securely exchanged.”
2. A data model, or “the what,” which includes a “set of XML and JSON schemas that define the payload format of ‘objects’ as they are exchanged between SIF-compliant applications.” (https://data.a4l.org/)

This standard primarily supports the administrative role that schools must take. One example might be when a school employee must add a new student into a school’s data ecosystem. If an organization has implemented the SIF standard, the school employee will add the new student to the SIS and the SIF standard can help those data of record move out into the other technical applications the organization is using. This might include a library system or a learning management system.

A4L represents a scalable standard. It is use-case driven and it is community-built. Organizations can adopt various parts of the standard as their needs arise or they can engage in wholesale implementations. It operates as a rest-based Application Programming Interface (REST API) and is both platform independent as well as vendor neutral.

This means that using the SIF standard does not require particular data models or software at either endpoint in order to move the data themselves from point to point.

A4L is part of the Data Standards United Group. It is aligned with the Common Education Data Standards.

Learn More

To learn more about A4L and the SIF standard, see:

https://home.a4l.org/about-us/

https://data.a4l.org/sif-specifications/