When school districts build interoperable learning ecosystems, students have access to a wider range of tools and provide effective ways for schools to manage their digital programs.
Imagine a teacher who wants to learn more about a student to tailor the educational program. Without data interoperability, they need to log in to district student information systems for formative assessments, check previous year achievements in the state data systems, use the teacher’s electronic grade book, learning object repository, and homework platform. Then they have to connect all the data to make sense of it. Switching between dozens of edtech platforms takes too much time and slows down the educators. Besides, these e-learning solutions often generate data in different formats, which additionally complicates information processing.
The lack of quality data management also affects the daily routine of students, researchers, universities, official bodies, and other stakeholders.
The implementation of interoperable e-learning solutions can improve the connection between teams and data records. A teacher will access information from multiple tools in a single interface to see all the details with no hassle.
MORE TIME FOR LEARNING
“Interoperability empowers schools to fully hone their data, to report on it in ways that meet their contextual needs and ultimately make it more effective,” said Jake Firman, director of education technology at Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) Public Schools. “It has the ability to add incredible efficiency for all the stakeholders along the way — mainly teachers, but also school leaders, students and families.”
DSST uses one digital system that collects real-time assessment data, and another that tracks classroom culture data. While both systems are valuable on their own, they are even more powerful when they come together and add context to each other.
“We’ve built a system that allows academic advisors to have a one-stop shop for data on how their advisee is doing. It gives them warnings if their advisee is getting disengaged. In our model, we’re able to pull data from all our tools and organize it to build a report that gives a full picture,” he said.
School districts and ed-tech companies have more work to do to make learning ecosystems like the one at DSST commonplace. Fortunately, the momentum seems to be moving in the right direction, as more educators, parents and school administrators are learning about the benefits of data interoperability and advocating for its adoption in schools around the country.
TALK TO THE EXPERTS
Because of the growing impact of remote, data interoperability trends in education are stronger than ever. Following healthcare and financial industries, educators realize that effective use of multiple tools requires smooth data sharing. Data Interoperability maximizes efficiency because powerful integration engines connect School Information Systems (SIS) with other applications and share the information amongst them. This means the data only has to be entered once which significantly reduces the workload on employees and even minimizes errors. Moreover, it even minimizes costs, leads to better departmental collaboration, and helps serve students in the best possible way.
FCS provides data interoperability. We analyze your needs to recommend the most effective way to implement smooth data sharing between multiple solutions. Discover the projects we have already completed and fill out the form to get in touch.