Data Interoperability Looms

Large as Districts Pursue

Innovation and IT Savings
Until now, data integration at Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools required IT staff to
manage point-to-point data integrations, with 40 data extracts to schedule and run each
night. 
One of those extracts goes to the district’s middleware product, which then connects it to
close to 100 separate learning applications, says Lance Lott, MNPS executive director of
technology and information services.

“That’s not ideal in a district with growing technology needs,” Lott says. As the use of
digital content and the number of digital tools in K–12 education explode, districts like
MNPS need more efficient ways to bring data from all those sources together to maximize
its impact on teaching and learning, says Lott. 
In response, MNPS is using a comprehensive data interoperability strategy that includes an
operational data store (ODS) to aggregate data from its student information and enterprise
resource planning systems across the district of 86,000 students and 170 schools. 
Central to the district’s interoperability strategy is CA Technologies’ Live API Creator,
which generates and manages the application programming interfaces that enable secure
data sharing in and out of the ODS, in accordance with the Ed-Fi Alliance interoperability
standard. API Creator has transformed data integration from an overnight process to one
that now takes 15 minutes, says MNPS Enterprise Solutions Architect Lee Barber.
“The CA tool significantly reduces development time and ensures the security of the data,
which was our top priority when we were researching the technology,” Barber says. 

The interoperability project, which has support from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation,
will take about two years to complete. The final phase will be a portal for vendors that will
automate the interoperability screening process for new applications, says Lott.
“We’re already a much nimbler operation that can more easily integrate new solutions and
respond quickly to the needs of the district,” he says. 

MORE FROM EDTECH: See how interoperability can boost K–12 school

communications.
Interoperability Mitigates the Costs of Walled Data Gardens
The push for data interoperability comes as school districts realize that they’re bearing the
costs — in dollars, staff time and, most important, stalled educational innovation — of
maintaining systems that don’t share data easily, says Erin Mote, executive director
of InnovateEdu, an educational nonprofit that runs the Project Unicorn initiative. Project
Unicorn is a coalition of school districts and vendors working toward data interoperability
in K–12 education.
“When applications don’t talk to each other, humans move the data from one system to
another by hand, taking hours and days that could be better spent,” she says. “The
proliferation of tools, along with the growth of one-to-one programs and the increased
emphasis on personalized learning has made the need for data interoperability more
imperative.”
While Project Unicorn doesn’t support a specific interoperability standard, adoption of
industry-aligned standards, such as those developed by the Ed-Fi Alliance or the IMS
Global Learning Consortium, is a necessary step to ensure that interoperability becomes the
norm as ed tech applications emerge, says Mote.

We're already a much nimbler operation that can more easily

integrate new solutions and respond to the needs of the
district."
Lance Lott Executive Director of Technology and Information Services, Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools

Vendors also recognize that data interoperability gives them a firmer foothold in the
evolving educational technology landscape as districts look for tools that can help create
a holistic view of student progress.
“The old way of walled gardens of data is over,” Mote says. “Vendors are recognizing that
bringing data together and getting it in the hands of teachers in ways they can use helps
them as well as the teachers and students.”

Manage Vendor Partnerships to Optimize Data Exchanges

For Josh Allen, director of technology architecture and strategy for Denver Public Schools
(DPS), data interoperability is largely about managing vendor relationships. 
“It’s not really a technical issue for us most of the time — it’s a matter of clarity with all
our vendors,” says Allen, whose district serves more than 93,000 students in 207 schools.
“They need to know what requirements they have to adhere to and that exchange of data is
a must.”
Those requirements include support of a data-sharing and single sign-on platform based on
the IMS Global Learning Consortium’s OneRoster data transfer standard.
Colorado’s Student Data Transparency and Security Act also mandates the security of all
student information, whether it’s stored or in transit. 
Data from financial, administrative and student information systems are fed into the
DPS ODS. The district’s development team works with vendors to verify and sometimes
help write the APIs that move information in and out of the data store.
“Once we’ve done the prework with a vendor, we test the application to prove that it has
interoperability with our environment,” Allen says. “We ensure our data is safe and that
we can use all of it. Vendors are cooperative because standards benefit them too.”
Data interoperability has allowed DPS to build portals that give teachers easy access to
the data they need for a comprehensive view of a student’s progress and challenges, says
Allen. Parents use the portals to track grades, class assignments and attendance, and can
even add to the student’s lunch money account or see school bus locations in real time.
MORE FROM EDTECH: K–12 schools change the integration conversation.
Interoperability Lets Schools Share Data for Personalized
Learning
With 41 schools, the Providence (R.I.) Public School District currently uses applications
from more than 50 vendors, and that number is growing. The district is also committed to
bringing data from all those sources to bear on the education of each of its 24,000 students,
making interoperability a priority, says PPSD Superintendent Christopher Maher.
“Personalized learning is the core of what we’re doing in instruction, and for that we need
to give students real-time data,” he says. “For that, all the pieces of our ed tech
environment have to talk to each other.”
As it is at DPS, interoperability with systems already in place is a basic requirement for any
ed tech tool the district purchases, says Cameron Berube, PPSD’s executive director for
teaching and learning. 

“We include a data-sharing agreement when we sign a contract,” she says. “Vendors
have to take care of APIs. If you want to work with us, you have to have interoperability
with our systems.”
Berube curates an annual vendor fair so that PPSD teachers and administrators can evaluate
technologies that meet quality and interoperability criteria and that fit the district’s
educational strategy, which is to give students the tools for self-directed learning.

“We’re creating individual learning profiles through which students will be able to see how

they’re doing and performing against standards,” says Berube. “They and their teachers
will have data that shows their strengths and their struggles and gives them more control of
their own education.”
K–12 District Evaluates Interoperability Offerings
While the call for secure data interoperability in educational technology is loud and clear,
the message is only slowly getting through, says Todd Wesley, CTO of Lakota Local
School District, which covers West Chester and Liberty townships in southwestern Ohio.
LLSD serves 16,500 students in 23 schools.
“Our focus continues to be on data interoperability, information security and, of course,
features,” he says. “Ed tech vendors know these are important to K–12 districts, but our
experience has been hit or miss when it comes to true, standards-based interoperability.”
LLSD relies heavily on third-party provider APIs, many of which are cloud-based, says
Wesley. When systems don’t fully mesh, the data integration is done by API calls
through coded scripts that LLSD automates centrally. The scripts must be manually
created, and some of the data sets require manual intervention, he says.
LLSD deploys OneLogin for single sign-on to the Canvas learning management system and
other applications. Wesley and his staff continue to evaluate interoperability offerings and
look to interoperability advocacy organizations — such as CoSN, ISTE, Future Ready
Schools and Digital Promise — for information and resources. The ultimate goal lies
ahead, he says.
“Teachers and staff should be able to focus on students as much as possible,” Wesley says.
“True data interoperability should provide a single pane of glass for educators to get what
they need to support student learning. When it’s in place, it’s a beautiful thing.”