Illuminations and Insights

We had the opportunity to sit down and talk with EA Board President Dr. Richard Bowman about the challenges impacting education and data spaces, what excites him the most about being affiliated with EA, and how he thinks the field is going to change in the future.

At Education Analytics (EA), we enjoy collaborating with our staff and partner organizations to write blogs that discuss the current challenges and successes in education and data spaces and work at EA. In this blog, we reflect on this past year, highlight our five most popular blogs of 2023, and look forward to what 2024 holds for EA.

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.

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.