Illuminations and Insights

The amount of data generated by schools and school districts continues to grow and it is a challenge to bring together all of those data in a manner that informs timely action. Our latest product, Podium, empowers schools and school districts with actionable data to help better serve students, families, and staff. In this blog, we describe how Podium helps to deliver the right data at the right time.

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.

Enable Data Union (EDU) is our open framework for analytics and data warehousing based on the Ed-Fi data standard. We are excited to be publicly releasing code and documentation for EDU at www.enabledataunion.org. In this article, we explain our reasoning for choosing to release this code under the PolyForm Noncommercial License. This license allows for noncommercial use, including any use by education agencies, non-profit organizations, and government agencies.

Much like working with Lego blocks, building modern data infrastructure in education requires not just having a vision or set of goals, but also organizing the component pieces in ways aligned to those goals. In this blog, we describe lessons learned from working with districts and states to implement Ed-Fi and discuss how our StartingBlocks product is helping education agencies realize a grounded approach to modernizing education technology.

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.

Enable Data Union (EDU) is open software for an Ed-Fi data warehouse solution and a community we are developing to share ideas, experiences, and code among education agencies. Stadium is a hosted version of this product provided by Education Analytics. In this blog, we highlight why this solution is needed, describe our philosophy around its development, and provide details on the EDU and Stadium products.