Illuminations and Insights
We shine a light on our partners, the work we've done across the country, and insights from our team members.
From datasets to data streams: How we can move the education field away from being data rich but information poor
At EA, we believe that deep integration of education research and technology has the power to create a new breed of modern, data-centric education organizations capable of achieving breakthrough student outcomes. But this integration requires the field of education research to catch up to the advances of modern technology, and the technology field to apply research-grade thinking to how we build and scale technology. In this blog, we propose that to achieve this integration, we need to replace the concept of a dataset with a data stream, and we examine this challenge from the perspective of education researchers and from technologists.
A collaborative state strategy for SLDS 2.0: A call to action
20 years of technology development and large-scale implementation of Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) have generated a wealth of knowledge, strategies, and successes, which will be invaluable to the next phase of SLDS work. In this blog, EA's CEO Andrew Rice lays out a vision for a collaborative state strategy for the next generation of SLDS that leverages the idea of a reference software build. The blog summarizes the policy and technological trends that have brought us to the field's current state and proposes a collaborative strategy to realize the promise and potential of the next version of SLDS.
Data neighborhoods: Preserving context around educational data
In this blog, we establish core principles for conceptualizing data interoperability as transport, including how decentralized governance models enable local control over data in ways that maximize privacy and security. We introduce the concept of "data neighborhoods" as a metaphor for this interoperability model, and we connect different kinds of context around educational data to the core principles.