5 State Education CIOs Collaborate on Interoperable Data Systems

A handful of state department of education leaders have formed a new group called the Ed-Tech Collaboratory (ETC) to pool resources, share best practices and build student data systems that are interoperable across state lines.

In a webinar today co-hosted by the data-focused nonprofit Project Unicorn, the group’s members — chief information officers from state education departments in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin — said ETC seeks to create and connect data systems to better serve students and teachers in each state.

The primary goals of the group are to standardize and unite state data systems that:

• track the student journey from education to career
• generate student transcripts
• manage student assessment data
• allow teachers to share learning content

Vanessa Wrenn, CIO of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, said ETC will serve as a hub for this work, where state education leaders can focus on universal standards and systems to improve student outcomes.

“We’re able to leverage all of our expertise areas through the Ed-Tech Collaboratory, where we have come together to create more common good between the states,” Wrenn said in the webinar. “Not losing our state’s independence … but being able to work together to create common data strategies and reference architecture, so we can share data stacks and create software tools that we can use between us.”

According to its website, ETC consists of a six-member advisory board made up of CIOs from its constituent states, along with Andrew Rice, CEO of the nonprofit Education Analytics. ETC will soon have a process in place for other states to join, according to Vijay Gollapudi, CIO of the Tennessee Department of Education.

“We do have a structure that we are working through on how we add CIOs and add states. There is a governance structure we’re trying to make sure we maintain in place,” he said. “There are 50 of us that could potentially join, and we want to make sure that we don’t get bogged down in the theoretical and actually continue on with practical implementations.”