Every year the Ed-Fi Alliance hosts its Technical Congress to bring together individuals from across the ed tech community, including data scientists, chief architects, IT application developers, software engineers, educational technology developers, and more. The goal of Tech Congress is to ensure that ed tech continues to have a positive impact on student and classroom outcomes through improving upon the Ed-Fi Technology Suite. This year, we had the amazing opportunity to send Education Analytics’ staff to Tech Congress to connect with school districts, ed tech leaders, and current and potential partner organizations. Here’s what EA staff took away from their time at Tech Congress 2024.
The Ed-Fi community has made massive steps in expanding use of the data standard across the country. Particularly at the local level, there are increased demands on integrations of more commonly used data systems to Ed-Fi. I'm excited about the work being done in the community to expand data coverage and therefore serve more educators with the right data at the right time.
The persistence of the whole community is really inspiring. It's a tall order to truly operationalize the kinds of analytics and interoperability that we know are possible, but the challenge is an important one and everyone’s bought in. Every year new progress is made, and we come together to share lessons so that the whole community can move forward together.
The continuous involvement within the Ed-Fi community drives the constant evolution of the Ed-Fi Data Standard to cater to the data requirements of schools and districts, thereby enhancing support for student outcomes.
It's always refreshing to gather with technologists from around the country within the Ed-Fi community and be a part of building the knowledge and technology stacks built around Ed-Fi, as well as discussing the future of Ed-Fi itself. This year brought the announcement of Tanager and it sounds incredibly exciting. We can't wait to get our hands on it and see what it's capable of!
Data interoperability offers challenging propositions even while using a proven data standard like Ed-Fi, mature frameworks and tools, and a community of passionate individuals.
Sometimes it's hard to keep the big picture in mind in the day-to-day work. Attending conferences like Tech Congress help me to reconnect with our partners and motivates me to keep pushing our shared vision forward.
Ed-Fi is a dynamic, evolving entity. It is a tool shaped by education leaders across the country to fit their needs, not just another platform that they must comply with. Tech Congress reflects the spirit of the education community as we work to build an open solution to fit the needs of the many while simplifying data access for all.
This year's Tech Congress was a recap of the thoughts and suggestions that were brought to light during last year's Tech Summit. The receptiveness to concerns and proposed innovations were thoughtfully considered and well received.
The conference was a terrific opportunity to connect with others in the growing Ed-Fi community. It was inspiring to see some of the innovative work being done in the space, as well as the Ed-Fi Alliance's collaborative approach to planning the future of Ed-Fi. I can't wait to see what the future holds.
Tech Congress is a valuable opportunity to connect with other members of the Ed-Fi community and hear about their most pressing data needs. That broader perspective empowers us to shape our products to better serve our partners across the country.
The attention paid to the balance of continuous improvement/innovation and the need for stable and accurate data always strikes me when I am with the Ed-Fi community. As more implementations become mature, it is exciting to see that thoughtfulness be focused not only on the base technology, but also the data standard and applications.
Tech Congress surfaced a need to balance the pace of Ed-Fi technology suite advancements with the impact of change felt by education agencies. Technology providers must partner with SEAs, ESAs, and LEAs to ensure implementations maintain ease of adoption while incorporating new capabilities and prioritizing security, performance, and usability.
The Ed-Fi community continues to fill me with optimism about the future of K-12 education. It's inspiring to see the EA team engage our education agency partners, the Ed-Fi Alliance, and fellow managed service providers toward realizing the vision of open, interoperable data standards and systems.
Tech Congress is where Ed-Fi's open-source community comes together to shape our technical goals for the year ahead. I value the opportunity to contribute insights from EA's partnerships, meet others in the community, and suggest improvements to Ed-Fi's data model and tools.
One of the key strengths of Ed-Fi - its ability to serve state education agencies, school districts, collaboratives, and more - also puts it in the challenging position of balancing these groups' interests. The Tech Congress is a fantastic opportunity to learn about the variety of needs across the country and contribute to decisions on how to deliver a data model that works for everyone.
Each year we convene at the Ed-Fi Technical Congress, and we get closer as a community and more aligned with each of our collective needs. I was impressed with the number of tech-savvy participants this year and the focus on supporting adoption of Ed-Fi through managed services providers.
Tech Congress was a great opportunity to connect with the Ed-Fi technical community. It provided a great space to engage in and learn about the different upstream aspects of the Ed-Fi technology that I don't directly get to think about in my day-to-day role as an analyst using the data, but that have a huge impact on the work of many different teams at EA, our partners and the community in general.
Ever-increasing adoption of Ed-Fi - especially at large scale, in-state deployments - is pushing the technology and the community to tackle challenging problems in pursuit of better educational outcomes throughout the country. Notable technical developments from this year's Tech Congress include a new focus on improved cloud-native technology, continued additions and improvements to the data standard, more interpretable data validation messages, and planned improvements to the credentialing and badging process.
