Many Edtech companies aim to be a district’s “one-stop-shop” for all of their edtech needs.

The challenge is that no single vendor is actually the best option for every product, and most of the vendors do not integrate their products easily with the products of another vendor. They have little incentive to do so – until now.­

The philanthropic community, led by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, believes that edtech products should all speak the same language so that districts can benefit from the data across multiple systems, and smaller vendors with really good offerings, have a chance to get used. With this in mind, they have created a data standard called, “Ed-Fi,” and in order to get the vendors to adopt it, they are funding reporting systems like ours that use the standard. Then if the vendor wants to do business with our districts, it now has a reason to use the standard. Over time, we anticipate the standard will be ubiquitous and edtech products will all speak the same language and data can easily be transferred between them.

To date, nearly 12,000 districts have adopted the Ed-Fi data standard, which has led to increasing adoption across the vendor community. Everything districts build on this data standard is open source, so when one of our districts asks if we can do something, we can often find some work from the broader Ed-Fi community to build on. In other words, by joining our collaborative, you are really joining a national movement that includes thousands of districts across the country – all pooling their resources and ideas on behalf of kids.