Contact Person: Patricia High
Oklahoma FY 2006
Task Order: $80,000
XML and Web Services Project for LEA Data Submission
This project will provide training and technical assistance for State Department of Education (SDE) IT staff to become proficient in the use of XML and development of secure web services. A plan will be developed to replace existing flat-file data collection systems to use XML and secure web services. One or more existing Web systems will be modified to use XML and web services. Training will be offered to a pilot group of Local Education Agency (LEA) IT staff to help them submit data using XML and secure web services.
Both state and federal education enterprise information systems are dependent upon quality data from many different LEA school software systems: student management systems, staffing systems, finance systems, etc. In support of the “data pipeline” concept introduced by the Performance-based Data Management Initiative (PBDMI), now called EDEN, whereby unit-level records move from the school site to the school district, to the state where summary statistics are compiled and sent to the United States Department of Education (USED), Oklahoma seeks training and technical assistance for SEA staff and subsequently for LEAs, in the use of extended markup language (XML) and Web Services, state of the art technology tools, that will allow LEAs to better validate their data and allow their computer systems to transfer the required data to the state without tedious error-prone manual intervention. This proposed XML and Web Services project will be used to improve the data quality assurance procedures for the SDE’s numerous online web applications that collect data from LEAs: School Personnel, Special Education Systems, Financial Accounting, Dropouts, District-administered Assessments, etc. These systems require the LEA staff to either enter data directly into the web application’s pages or to build flat text files with a specific format and upload these files through the web applications. This process requires either duplicate data entry or the difficult and time-consuming process of extracting, validating, and formatting flat text files for upload.
Updating these systems to use XML and secure web services will reduce redundant data entry and the amount of time spent by IT staff to extract, validate and format data. Using XML schema and the other capabilities of XML and web services will standardize formatting and validation and allow LEA’s to much more easily validate their data and allow their computer systems to transfer the required data without error-prone manual intervention.
Oklahoma FY 2002
Task Order: $80,000
Phase II of a Web-based School Personnel Data Collection System
The Oklahoma State Department of Education received task order funding for phase two of a project to develop a web-based school personnel data collection system. The second phase of this project developed out of complications encountered with a task order in FY00 that was to lay the groundwork of this data collection system. This task order would work, in particular, to expand and capture data elements from related systems into one comprehensive DataSpecs data dictionary, begun in Phase I. Task order funds would also be used to rewrite the many reports generated from the certified personnel data set.
The major goal of the project would be to, in close collaboration with Oklahoma’s LEAs, improve the quality of school personnel records and reporting capabilities to the SEA and the US Department of Education. This system should also help to ease the reporting burden for LEAs and further the Oklahoma SEA vision of becoming a “paperless” agency.
Work on this task order was scheduled to begin in September 2001 and conclude by November 2002.
Oklahoma FY 2000
Task Order: $80,000
Development of a Web-based School Staffing Collection System
The Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) received task order funding to replace their paper-based data collection system on certified and non-certified school personnel with a new web-based system capable of on-line data entry and file transfer. Creation of this web-based data collection tool would eliminate time-consuming manual data entry at the SEA, ease the burden of data entry for schools, and improve Oklahoma’s timeliness in reporting to NCES. Furthermore, it would incorporate the expansion of data elements and the alignment of staff position definitions with those in the NCES Staff Data Handbook.
The major objectives for this project were:
Work on this project was scheduled to begin in September 1999 and conclude by July 2000. Deliverables one and two were submitted together in September 2001. Deliverable 1 summarized the need for the project but did not outline specific activities or explain the considerable delay in its submission.
Deliverable 2 detailed specific actions and problems confronted by this project. In particular, the SEA contracted with Evaluation Software Publishing (ESP) to review their current system and make recommendations for their new web-based system. A committee of SEA officials then met to analyze the paper data collections, but input from school business managers led to a desire to use a different reporting system from the NCES Staff Data Handbook. This new direction led to a revised project timeline. Other technical problems were also encountered, with Visual FoxPro being dropped from Macintosh systems by Microsoft. The Windows 2000 server operating system was selected as a replacement. Changing legislative and SEA priorities further slowed the progress on this task order, though with a new focus on developing the web tool, work was later scheduled be completed by June 2002.
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