The Starter Kit approach is proving to be an effective way to provide an entry point for Educator Prep Programs (EPPs) to launch interoperability efforts within their program, without compromising on what matters to them. Over the past year we’ve been working on delivering the Program Diversity and Persistence Starter Kit and the Clinical Experience and Performance Starter Kit with the goal to help EPPs answer their most pressing questions 

The Program Diversity and Persistence Starter Kit aims to give EPP’s insight into the diversity of their candidate population, including program completers and certified teachers. This starter kit uses data from the Student Information System (SIS), certification/licensure data, and financial aid data. This candidate data can be broken down by several attributes (e.g., cohort, program, race) to get a more detailed view to better assist in informing continuous improvement efforts. 

Clinical Experience and Performance Starter Kit

The Clinical Experience and Performance Starter Kit aims to give EPP’s insight into the performance of their candidates using an evaluation and self-report style survey. Both the evaluation and survey can be broken down by various attributes (e.g., certification status, evaluation date) to shed light on areas for further candidate support and curriculum improvement.  

In February of 2021, Ed-Fi released early access “Minimal Viable Product” versions of both starter kits, looking for feedback from the community. Shortly after, in May, we launched a Starter Kit Pilot Cohort. The pilot cohort comprises of six EPPs from all around the country interested in understanding more about their data and believing Ed-Fi and the starter kit solution can help. Each EPP is currently working through implementation of their chosen starter kit, with lead EPPs expected to have their reports in production soon.

What’s new in the latest version release? 

Working with the pilot implementations (and community at large) Ed-Fi is excited to announce version 1.0 of both the Program Diversity and Persistence, and Clinical Experience and Performance Starter Kits.  

Each of the starter kits has had significant refinement since we released the MVP versions, including: 

  • Updated visuals 
  • Added role-based data security 
  • Comprehensive documentation including: 
  • A beginning to end setup guide for the Ed-Fi solution and the starter kit reports 
  • Mapping guidance to help EPP’s and System Integrators get data from source systems into Ed-Fi 
  • Online demonstration environments 
  • An Amazon AWS quick-start VM that can quickly launch with the complete EPP starter kit solution in minutes 

Security and the online demo environment 

The latest release provides a place where anyone interested in the starter kits can test drive the starter kits without the need to download files or install software. With this release we are hosting each version of the starter kit in a cloud based Power Bi environment. This will allow for easier sharing of the solution concept with other stakeholders and provide access for them to poke around each report as they would if the reports were installed at the institution.  

Additionally, each starter kit provides two different security views, one that allows access to Personally Identifiable Information (information like candidate names and identifiers) and one that does not.  

More information for the online demo environments can be found on the following pages: 

Learn More

Interested in discovering the latest with the EPP Starter Kits or would like to get involved with the EPP Community, please reach out to Lindsey Judd, Community Manager or Steven Arnold, Development Lead 

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