Technology Solution Makes Important Contribution to Ongoing Efforts to Connect Student Data Systems and Transform Education

By AIT News Desk On Aug 5, 2020

Unicon Announces Final Release of Ed-Fi ODS / API deployment for Amazon Web Services

Unicon, Inc., a leading technology consulting firm focused solely on the education ecosystem, announced the release of the Ed-Fi ODS / API deployment for Amazon Web Services (Suite 3). This technology solution allows users to easily deploy a new copy of the Ed-Fi ODS / API to an Amazon Web Services tenant. It enhances interoperability, helping state and local education agencies get up and running with a modern IT architecture quickly, allowing them to make better use of data to support students. It was developed by Unicon in collaboration with the Ed-Fi Alliance, and Amazon Web Services.

The Ed-Fi Data Standard is a widely adopted open-source data standard developed by the educational community. It serves as the foundation for enabling interoperability among secure data systems and contains a unifying data model designed to capture the meaning and inherent structure in the most important information in the K–12 education enterprise. The Ed-Fi Operational Data Store (ODS) provides a secure, transactional information store that integrates data from multiple source systems and applications. The Ed-Fi API accompanies the Ed-Fi Operational Data Store and provides a developer-friendly interface to create, read, and update information.

“With the urgency and uncertainty of supporting students and educators during this public health crisis, connecting student data once and for all is more important than ever.” said Dave Mendez, Director of Cloud Services, Unicon. “Institutions and local and state education agencies are benefiting from the scalable nature of cloud infrastructure provided by AWS. The Ed-Fi ODS / API cloud deployment solution takes advantage of recent advancements in AWS deployment methods, resulting in templates that allow for better control of the environment, easier updates, and the concise documentation, while embracing AWS best practices regarding architecture, security, and management.”

The Ed-Fi ODS / API deployment solution is a set of cloud formation templates and Lambda functions that reduce the amount of time and effort needed to get a new instance of an Ed-Fi ODS / API up and running. Each deployment follows AWS best practices, providing a secure, highly available, performant, and cost effective solution for end users. The deployment takes just over one hour to complete, and the end user is provided with step-by-step documentation to ensure that the process of launching the solution is easy and efficient for new users of AWS. For more advanced users of AWS, the solution can be launched inside an existing Virtual Private Cloud to easily integrate with existing AWS solutions.

“Educators have more data sources today than ever before, and while more data is valuable, it’s not always useful, accessible and secure. That is the fundamental problem we are working to solve with our partners in the Ed-Fi Community,” said Chris Moffatt, Vice President of Technology, Ed-Fi Alliance. “Unicon and AWS have completed the technical work to help school districts and states stand up the Ed-Fi ODS / API quickly and securely in a modern cloud environment, which will help educators bring together data they need to support students, especially at this critical time.”