CODEWITHSUNDEEP
oauthscreen-scrapingsystem-integration
Nick Cooper
Nick Cooper

Reputation: 11

Export data from a Learning Management System

I'm looking into integrating with Learning Management Systems / School Management Systems like PowerSchool, Skyward, and Moodle.

There are 3 approaches that I see: screen scraping, parsing exported grades (csv files), and integration through a public API.

Does anyone have experience getting data from LMSs? Information on APIs seems pretty scarce and I would like to avoid screen scraping.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 353

Answers (1)

K4M
K4M

Reputation: 952

There are few data exchange standards in K12:

Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) This is the US Department of Education and it tries to define / model K12 data, eactually more than K12 (i.e preK, college etc.)

Schools Interoperability Frameworks (SIF) This is both a data standard and data exchange specification. This is fairly old protocol (SOAP based). The data standard is now based on CEDS since SIF 3.0

Ed-Fi This is the newest in town and gaining traction slowly. Many large vendors now supports it. There are even now 3rd party ODS (operational data store) offerings that aim to combine data from (and serve data to) vendors based on Ed-Fi data exchange format (Some also provides reporting/dashboard solutions on top of their ODS offering). This is a large data model (tries to accomplish what CEDS does) and unlikely to be implemented by small vendors (hence continue using CSV). The difference between CEDS and Ed-Fi is that Ed-Fi also has solutions for data exchange infrastructure (ODS, dashboard etc.). Started in Texas but state education departments started to adopt it.

OneRoster This is both a data standard and data exchange specification. You can find many vendor to support it partly because it is old and it only covers the basic rostering info, unlike Ed-Fi, which tries to be a universal data model.

Clever similar to OneRoster. It's a service that solves rostering data exchange between school districts and vendors. It's very popular with school districts but not all vendors prefers it because Clever charges vendors, not the districts per student. Even with its popularity, not all vendors supports it.

That being said, many well established K12 educational products are not up-to-par with other sectors in terms of integration. That's because K-12 sector is not a fast moving or demanding sector. You will see that the most commonly offered method of data exchange is providing CSV through their (or your) SFTP.

Some large players started to offer full scale API. Skyward for example is one of the well established student information system (SIS) available out there. They now have an API in their new Qmlativ version for almost anything along with support for Ed-Fi and OneRoster but many of their customers are still on the previous version (SMS 2.0). Generic tools like Moodle may have better integrations tools and you can have better luck there.

There are too many small vendors that offers a specialized product and lack resources to provide anything beyond a CSV file. Eduphoria for example, even though they had a large market share, they lacked any data integration options, which forced us to export data through browser automation. Now, they let districts have access to back-end database via yearly service fee.

In conclusion, there are too many players and their is no well agreed upon solution yet (maybe Ed-Fi in future). For now, you will have to work with each vendor through their client (i.e. the school district) and work out a solution, maybe a CSV or back-end database access through the district.

Upvotes: 1

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