The end of each year always provides the opportunity to reflect on the successes, progress and key learnings from the past twelve months, as well as plan and set goals for the coming year. Saying that 2017 was a great year for the Ed-Fi Community would be an understatement. To take pause and recognize all of the work – both big and small – done this year, we asked various members of the Ed-Fi team to share their proudest accomplishment from this year, as well as what is top-of-mind as we approach 2018.
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“I’m most proud that we certified three Student Information System (SIS) systems on the Ed-Fi Data Standard this year – Infinite Campus, PowerSchool, and Skyward, Inc. These certifications impact not only our community, but the education industry as a whole, as we work toward an interoperable future where students and teachers benefit from connected data. My focus for the next year will continue to be reducing cost and complexity from a domain that is inherently costly and complex!”
– Eric Jansson, Senior Program Manager
“As a new member to the Ed-Fi team this year, I’m most proud that we renewed our commitment to collaboration with Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), including the publication of our Collaboration Guidelines. These will be hugely helpful in expanding the data dictionary and models that lie at the core of education data needs. I’m also excited about our work with AEM Corporation on connecting Ed-Fi’s Data Standard to the Center for the Integration of IDEA Data (CIID)’s EDFacts reporting tool, Generate. Later this month, I’ll be joining Duane Brown from CIID for a webinar where we’ll discuss building interoperability between Ed-Fi and Generate. 2018 will be pivotal year for ESSA implementation and I’m excited to support the innovative ways states will be able to leverage Ed-Fi for their work around personalized learning, school improvement, accountability/financial transparency, and public reporting.”
– Maureen Wentworth, Strategic Partnerships Manager
“The launch of Community365 was the highlight of this year for me because it was in direct response to our community members’ request for greater transparency and more open communication channels. A lot of great tools and resources stemmed from this initiative, including our Slack Team where Ed-Fi Community members can engage and collaborate with one another in real-time. Another highlight from this year was attending the Florida CODE Summit (FL CODE: the Florida Collaborative on Operational Data for Educators) hosted by the North East Florida Educational Consortium (NEFEC). This was an event hosted on their accord, but focused almost entirely on Ed-Fi implementations. It’s awesome to see our dedicated community members using the power of connections to spread our message. For 2018, my core focus will be building a groundswell of analytics and assessment vendors that champion and adopt Ed-Fi.”
– Sean Casey, Senior Partnerships Manager
“My proudest accomplishment from this year is our revamped website and new Ed-Fi video. Both of these serve as shareable tools that help make the Ed-Fi message more accessible to every audience, from newcomers to veterans, which is critical to sustaining our momentum. Heading into 2018, I’m thinking about how we can continue to grow our audience. Our community continues to be our greatest asset, so my goal is to help create tools that enable and equip our community to amplify our work and reach new audiences.”
