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OEA Overview
Open Education Analytics (OEA) is a community of education systems, coordinated by Microsoft Education, collaborating to develop open-sourced data analytics solutions for the education sector built on Azure Synapse Analytics and PowerBI.
- GitHub repository: https://github.com/OpenEducationAnalytics/OpenEduAnalytics
- OEA Overview video: OEA Overview - YouTube
Data Analytics and AI
We are currently working with the Fresno Unified School District in California to build a hybrid student dashboard for student digital activity and in-person attendance.
Figure 1: Sample hybrid student engagement PowerBI dashboard This dashboard, which will soon be a package published on the OEA GitHub, combines data for student in-person attendance in school with their overall digital engagement across Fresno’s digital learning ecosystem (e.g. across all apps used by students for learning). This provides a more comprehensive view of student engagement in learning 24/7 than attendance data alone and ladders up to a long-term vision of student intervention targeting in the district.
OEA Community Spotlight
Building a strong community is at the center of all successful open-source projects. OEA is designed in partnership with education customer communities worldwide who are already contributing back to OEA. Our initial worldwide “Project Constellation” community is expanding to regional OEA Communities in the US, Australia, Finland and worldwide.
We work these communities directly and through our partners to identify their data and AI pain points, define common use cases, build data reports and ML models, and share great examples developed by community members. We also have an upcoming Deep Dive Synapse training for all our partners to position them to implement OEA for global education systems.
OEA Tech: Helping Education Systems Setup Their Modern Data Estate
We have partnered with the Nebraska Department of Education on their statewide longitudinal data plan for rapid data modernization to prioritize education equity. With COVID widening the disparities among students in rural areas and those in urban areas, this project sought to democratize analytics especially for small rural districts across the state. This project dramatically reduced the time to value for analytics. Through this work, we are also developing an open-source Ed-Fi module for the OEA GitHub, so that other OEA community members can use the assets developed through the Nebraska project.
OEA is building open-source technical assets like the OEA standard reference architecture for education analytics on Synapse. Assets include setup scripts, notebooks, pipelines and PowerBI templates, which are all available for free on the OEA GitHub. Our OEA partners and community members will be contributing more assets to the repository.
Figure 2: The OEA Reference Architecture Additional Resources