Illuminations and Insights

At Education Analytics, we’ve seen firsthand the advantages given to the education field when we can connect data systems, like attendance, assessment, lunch programs, and more together through Ed-Fi. Whether you are just starting your exploration of how Ed-Fi can benefit your work, or you’re established in the process, here are five Ed-Fi vocabulary terms to know and share: Interoperability, Education Agency, Source System, Student Information System, and Data Warehouse.

The release of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has unleashed innumerable possibilities for new interfaces between computers and human experts (like teachers), where the algorithm is not just reporting information, but can instead act like a superpowered assistant. Although AI models have the potential to provide valuable insights at a low-cost to educators, challenges remain when applying these models to the education sector due to privacy concerns and data infrastructure barriers. In this blog, EA’s CEO Andrew Rice describes the importance of training AI models using specific contextual data and proposes a public-interest driven AI strategy that uses common data surfaces, prioritizes non-commercial infrastructures, and empowers educators to leverage AI tools while safeguarding privacy and avoiding commercial exploitation.

Data interoperability is poised to radically transform educational research by making work with educational data less costly but more efficient, scalable, and actionable. In our latest blog, EA’s CEO Andrew Rice highlights 10 questions that researchers could answer more meaningfully, more accurately, and more quickly when using interoperable data streams. The blog describes how interoperability is on the cusp of revolutionizing educational research by effortlessly bringing together data from different sources, allowing statistical research outputs to live in real time, and turning rigorous research into actionable, operational systems for educators.

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.