Initiatives

EdUnify Task Force

EdUnify

Across education, the utilization and effectiveness of data and information technologies is severely inhibited by access methods, differing protocols, non-standard payloads, varying data definitions, and inability to trust disparate applications stove piped by proprietary design. Billions of dollars are spent annually trying to move data across components employed by stakeholder computer systems. The current state of automation, with all its redundancy, unnecessary aggregation and inaccuracy render a tremendous burden on the educational investment society as a whole is making.

Policy, governance, research, teaching, administration, funding, and learning are all impacted. The unintended consequence of metered design without considering the external interchanges which contribute to additional obstacles and costs is avoidable. The accurate, authoritative and secure transmission of data spanning components and stakeholders would respect and reinforce autonomy and roles, by connection, rather than push the work around mentality that has been fostered by the industry fearful of data access, use and security.

The education industry spends approximately 4% of operating expenses on IT which approximates $50 Billion annually. Of that, approximately 50% or $25 Billion is spent supporting connections and movement of data across disparate applications inside and outside the institution poorly. Even with that much money spent to keep things band-aided together where funding has been applied, the ineffective use of technology is wasting away the capacity of tools and the investment in automation.

Without addressing the challenge to bridge systems and components, we will be continually haunted by what could be, rather than what is. Automation can empower and serve the industry with innovation and unity in purpose. Thus, the call for EdUnify, to create a registry, lookup, and supporting services to enable applications and computer systems to seek and connect through a common abstract pipe following community developed methods, protocols, payloads and services promoted on a voluntary basis.

What are the Goals of the EdUnify Task Force?

document use cases that articulate our goals.
develop a plan to design a registry or index with metadata about web services.
enable integration, ontology, data exchange services.
develop a registration and maintenance processes that make sense for education.
prove the concept with reference implementations among participating organizations.
stimulating the publication and use of existing access methods.
stimulating new access method specifications through PESC, SIFA, IMS or other standard bodies.
drive adoption within our organizations.

Functional Goals and Epic Stories

The following are examples of potential high-level functional goals.

Respect the federation and automony of information service providers who have their own interests to design, develop, deploy and maintain data and analytic systems with different data stores across education enterprises.
Provide fast, reliable and secure access to a federated Registry and Lookup Services to improve people's productivity through applications designed to channel request for services and response to service requests abstracting the differences in data and methods behind them.
Enable the PESC and SIFA community to foster sharing of data and method (functions) reuse across stakeholder applications, utilzing direct and indirect automated bridges.
Enable the development of alerts and feedback loops across the P20 landscape without imposing or forcing how, by letting the open marketplace and motives to drive improvement in services through collabortive technologies.
Respect organization controls, business policies and practices over their data and services.
Enable people and organizations to align initiatives, improve outcomes and reduce duplication dispersed across information technology investments reducing the tax imposed by integration and interface complexity.
Allow everyone to gain access to data definitions, semantics and enumeration which will improve how services are developed and delivered to people thru online applications.
Create an extendable platform to explore, interrogate and request advertised services by stakeholder honoring the protocols, business rules and requirements managed by providers of the advertised data services.
Build, deploy and extend a commericially profitable online marketplace to foster competition, innovation and the abstraction of proprietary interests amoung stakeholders reducing their risks, fears and anxieties inhibiting their efforts to leverage common specifications for data and methods.

The following are examples of enumerated types of services:

Student and Faculty Data Services
Institutional and Academic Data Services
Course and Program Transferability Disclosure Services
21st Century Learners Spanning Multiple Institution Services
Student Access to their Data through Electronic Services
Enabling New and Innovative Technologies to Support Teaching and Learning Services

The Task Force is preparing very specific, structured use cases that the EdUnify frameworks will support to help identify specifications and technology it will develop or apply. The Task Force is preparing a set of use cases in a common format to help identify the constituents served and processes addressed in each use case. There is a template which can be used to start each new use case.

Subsequent phases of EdUnify will include national and international data exchange and reporting functionality, an agent to link PK12 and workforce systems with higher education systems, and functionality to enable timely disclosure to students through an academic transfer network regarding transferability of credits, among other services. Similar to the ATM network in banking, automation of electronic services in higher education simplifies access to data and data providers, lowers the cost of managing data and data systems, and accelerates performance and service over the long term.

DOWNLOADS

EdUnify
Jason Elwood of redLantern at the launch of PESC's EdUnify Task Force. 12/18/09. Washington DC.

EdUnify WIKI

Introductory Flash Demo

"How to Use" Flash Demo

EdUnify Homepage

Announcement for Launch of EdUnify Task Force

EdUnify Flyer

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