Lesson Plan
Options and Prerequisites
(Highly Recommended) Prerequisites | ||
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Bring a laptop! | ||
This lab is intended to be hands-on for everyone who attends, therefore all attendees are expected to bring a laptop. Attendees will use their computer to either connect remotely to provided Virtual Machines to follow the steps in this lab, or use their own Windows laptop for those who are able to. | ||
Prepare your computer or your cloud environment! | ||
Some attendees will want to focus on an enterprise deployment while others will want to use the one of the options provided on the Ed-Fi Exchange for cloud deployments (AWS, Azure) or local install. | ||
Azure tenancy prerequisite: | ||
You can use an existing Azure subscription and login provided you are Co-Owner (Co-Admin is not sufficient) Note that the free Azure subscription requires a credit card! | ||
AWS tenancy prerequisite: | ||
AWS requires rights to add permissions to the global <updating> | ||
Laptop prerequisites: | ||
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Options | |
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Use a provided virtual machine to: | |
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Use your own workstation to: | |
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"I'm supposed to deploy something..?"
(or - Governance is the Answer. What was the question?)
The Ed-Fi ODS/API is a reference implementation of the Ed-Fi Universal Data Model and API specification. It is provided as downloadable source code on GitHub, using Microsoft .NET, SQL Server, and appropriate deployment scripts for an enterprise Windows environment. The members of the community built and shared deployment artifacts for compatible cloud providers in addition to a standalone installer package, all of which are hosted on the Ed-Fi Exchange. During this lab, you will choose one of these approaches and deploy your own Ed-Fi ODS/API.
Becoming an effective Ed-Fi Agency
Becoming an effective Ed-Fi Agency means adopting a mindset across the entire district of:
- Focusing on value for instructors, curriculum, assessment, and leadership teams
- Starting with the ends in mind and delivering on promises
- Communicating with stakeholders, including vendors, partners, administrators, and your community.
- Sharing your experiences, good or bad.
These are the foundation of governance that education agencies often look to their IT departments to implement. However, governance is not an IT process, it is an institutional mindset of implementing patterns of success.
Explaining data interoperability to your instructors and administrators
The hardest job for a technical team member is convincing your instructional or assessment staff of why they should care about the Ed-Fi Standard, about how a common language to work with other teams helps get what they want done. Until you can show them, you'll have to use some specific examples of how the lack of interoperability wastes their time and limits their ability to act.
Deployment scenarios and example solutions
The Ed-Fi ODS/API is a multi-tenant solution which can be deployed for statewide use or use by individual districts. For the purposes of this lab, we'll focus on setting up a development environment for you to use while developing and testing API connections from your source systems or ETL processes.
For more information on production deployments, refer to the Platform Development Guide for the version you are interested in on Techdocs.
Hands-On with the Ed-Fi ODS
Connecting to your development environment
Virtual Machines are provided during the live lab to make it easy to dive in. These VMs are provided with the following software: Window 10, Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Developers Edition, Visual Studio 2017 Community, Git client, and any dependencies.
Get Running
Standard development build
Go directly to the Getting Started Guide if you want to go for it with a local install on your laptop.
If you want to use the VM to build and play, follow along here
Cloud installation on Azure
If you encounter any errors the Troubleshooting and Tuning an Installation guide may be able to help diagnose and correct.