1. Successful Standards Usage in the Real World
Aziz Elia, Cpsi Ltd
Rafael Gallardo, Puget Sound eSD
Mike Reynolds, Cedarlabs
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2. Oklahoma City Public Schools
A Case Study with CPSI, Ltd.
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3. The Problems Faced by Oklahoma City Public School
In 2005, Oklahoma City Public Schools (OKCPS) came to CPSI with several pain points surrounding student, teacher, and staff account management problems with Active Directory (AD).
Volume was an issue.
With over 50,000 students plus teachers and other staff, it was nearly impossible to manage getting Active Directory accounts created and managed with the limited number of IT staff at OKCPS.
Student mobility caused problems.
With a high rate of student mobility, the IT staff at OKCPS was struggling to keep up with the constant changes that were necessary to make by hand in AD. They needed to be sure accounts were up to date for security.
Too many apps to provision by hand.
OKCPS provides dozens of apps to their students, teachers, and staff to provide high quality education for their students. Each of these apps required file exports to be uploaded by hand over SFTP to provision accounts.
Data was just not clean enough.
The data being entered by staff was not always accurate or up-to-date enough to keep up with the needs of teachers, students, and administrative staff. OKCPS needed a way to clean up the data.
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4. The Solution Overview
OKCPS needed a solution that would be rolled out in phases due to the number of problems they faced. 1
Phase 1: SIF, Active Directory, and Microsoft Exchange
The first phase was to get the Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange under control via SIF Integration with Student Information System and Human Resource System.
ORGANIZATON SIZE
46,000 Students
4,600 Staff/Teachers
87 Schools
Phase 2: Account Provisioning for Third Party Apps, the SIS Switch, and State Reporting
The second phase to was to get data provisioned to a number of third party applications used by the district. In addition, OKCPS moved to a new SIS. CPSI helped to automated the state reporting with the new SIS and integrate it into the overall solution.
Visual CASEL / xdAD
xDComposer
xDStore
xDValidator
xDStore Connectors
Publishing SIF Agents
IMPLEMENTATION SUMMARY 2
Phase 3: Data Validation
Now that data was moving easily between apps within the district, a new problem emerged. Data needed to be more accurate so data validation came into play.
SIF 2.5
STANDARDS USED 3
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5. Phase 1: SIF, Active Directory, and Microsoft Exchange
SIF Agent for TERMS In 2005, CPSI began Phase One of the project. The first step was to produce a SIF Agent for TERMS – the Student Information System in use at the time. TERMS was a legacy SIS that ran on top of an AS400 database that was not longer in production by the original software vendor. OKCPS needed a SIF Agent for TERMS to use for the AD automation as well as for reporting data to the State of Oklahoma over SIF. SIF Agent for SAP The Human Resource system, SAP, also needed a SIF Integration to automate data within the district. CPSI created a Publishing SIF Agent for SAP at OKCPS. Active Directory Automation with xdAD / Visual CASEL After the completion of the SIF Agents for TERMS and SAP, OKCPS began the implementation of xdAD (Visual CASEL at the time) and the xdAD SIF Agent. xdAD attached to the SIF implementation to collect the data stored in TERMS and SAP in real time. With xdAD, the district was able to implement real time automation of AD user accounts, groups, home directories, and more. Microsoft Exchange Integration with xdAD / Visual CASEL OKCPS utilizes Microsoft Exchange for mail account within the district. With xdAD, the district was able to fully automate the Microsoft Exchange management.
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6. Phase 2: Student Information System Switch and State Reporting
The Student Information Switch: Moving from TERMS to Infinite Campus
OKCPS underwent a change of Student Information Systems in the summer of TERMS had been the SIS for many years and OKCPS relied on the fact that as a local database, they could locate and utilize any and all of the data within their system.
Because Infinite Campus is a cloud hosted, closed Student Information, OKCPS no longer had direct database access to the data within their SIS. OKCPS began using the SIF Agent for Infinite Campus, but soon found there was issues in the amount of data and what kind of data they were receiving from the SIS of their SIF Agent.
In addition, OKCPS wanted to implement an Operational Data Store (ODS) where all of the data would reside before being sent to third party applications. The goal was to also send their reporting data to the State of Oklahoma via SIF from the Operational Data Store located at the district.
In order to provide the State of Oklahoma with the full set of data needed for state reporting, OKCPS would need to have all of the data in their ODS. The problem was that the SIF Agent from Infinite Campus did not send all of the data needed over the SIF Agent.
To solve this problem, CPSI augmented the data being sent over the SIF Agent with a Publishing Connector to Infinite Campus that utilized file extracts to supplement the missing data elements. By mixing both the SIF implementation and other means of data integration, OKCPS was able to send all of the data needed for state reporting easily.
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7. Phase 2: Student Information System Switch and State Reporting
A SIF-Enabled Operation Data Store (ODS) with xDStore OKCPS needed to collect the data from Infinite Campus and SAP into an Operational Data Store that they could then use to send data to multiple third party apps over SFTP or APIs. Connecting the Third Party Apps Connecting the numerous apps used at OKCPS was easy with Connectors and xDStore. OKCPS has implemented automated data Connectors to a number of apps, including:
Clever
RenLearn RDI
RankOne
Lighthouse
eBackPack
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8. Phase 3: Data Validation
With data automated, the focus moved to cleaning the data. As data began moving automatically and in real-time, there was a new focus at OKCPS. It quickly became clear that there was issues within the data itself. Data accuracy caused issues in the many downstream apps receiving data. These issues were not caused by the technology, but by how the users entered data and exactly what data was and was not getting entered. The xDValidator is currently being implemented at OKCPS to interrupt the flow of data entry and quickly let data entry staff know what is wrong with the data being entered. The data entry staff is alerted data issues in near real-time where they go back to the source system to make changes in the data. With data being fixed at the source, OKCPS is able to clean the data at all layers, which leads to better accuracy across all systems in use.
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9. If you would like to learn more about our solution or more about how Oklahoma City Public Schools implement a mix and match solution for data automation, please check out our website or give us a call.
Michelle Elia
Aziz Elia
CONTACT US
CPSI, Ltd
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10. Student Record Exchange and Student Success Link
Leveraging SIF and Ed-Fi to Achieve Universal data
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11. Student Mobility and Community Relationships
In some states, 25-55% of the school’s student population switches schools each year.
About 55,000 students transfer into WA state schools every year. About 42,000 transfer out of state.
High mobility can have dramatic effects on districts, students and families
Improve the experience for families and students
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12. The Challenge
Creating and providing easy access and portability of student information for district to district and district to community based organization
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13. Student Record Exchange (SRE)
We developed a vision for efficient student record exchange with 7 cooperating school districts in Washington State. This vision describes a system that is comprehensive, tailored, automated, highly regulated, and secure. The rapid transfer of student data would allow school staff to:
place students into the appropriate classes and services immediately,
populate early warning systems to provide continuity of interventions,
import administrative data to reduce paperwork burden.
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14. Student Success Link
Securely shares real-time academic data with community-based organizations that have parental consent and district approval to use the data to understand and improve student outcomes.
Builds capacity within organizations to use data to improve practice, and to safeguard student data across their programs, through training and coaching.
Strengthens the partnerships between schools/districts, community partners, and families
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15. The Broader Problem and Solutions
Education software is a fast-growing, fragmented market, and systems don’t exchange critical student data easily. This creates barriers to implementation and innovation.
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16. What Cedar Labs Does
Provide a frictionless, secure process for exchanging education data across the software systems that need it, simplifying and enabling innovation for districts, states, and vendors.
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17. How We Do It Universal data translator Hub & Spoke model Real-time
Hosted or on-premises
Dedicated to open standards
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18. Hub & Spoke Approach

19. SRE Architecture

20. Extending the Value
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21. Student Success Link

22. Unified system contributes value to the region
Value Lever
Strategy
How Student Success Link addresses
Resulting in...
Data integration
Centralize data integration entry points
Single organization (PSESD) coordinates backend data integrations through single system
All districts use same tools for management
Districts spend less time spent creating data extracts and reports
Data reporting
Aggregate and surface CBO data for many program providers
Streamline data reporting policy and practice
Consistent data vocabulary for all stakeholders
Cohesive analyses of YD CBO data across and within sub-sectors.
Resource alignment
Assemble like-minded partners around common effort
All parts of the collective impact initiative have access to the same process and tools
CBO’s and districts help to design the system they will later use.
Greater data visibility and use across the entire region.
Cost
Provide a single low-cost solution for all nonprofits
Eliminates redundant development efforts
Leverages the low-cost, sustainable data management platform from Race to the Top
CBO’s spend less time identifying the best data solution and more time serving youth.
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23. Data bridge between schools and CBO’s
In the Classroom/School
Teachers and school staff collect data to understand what’s working for students and adjust supports.
Districts and PSESD
Academic data is managed by the school district, and the PSESD supports districts in securely sharing and using the data.
Youth-serving CBO’s
Organizations share academic data to better support students together and improve outcomes.
Student Success Link is a tool for organizations to securely share and use academic data to better support students.
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25. Next Steps Expand SRE and Student Success Link
Leverage hub & spoke to connect additional software systems
Data validation
Exploring multi-state implementation
Explore ways to leverage infrastructure to connect to Ed-Fi open source community
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26. Any questions?
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