Building Toolkits to Access Open Educational Data

The push for open data from government has been gaining momentum over the last few years. This has taken concrete shape in the form of data being released in more usable formats, including websites that are especially designed to release general data and educational data at the federal level. Some local governments are following suit.

As more datasets become accessible - and this includes comparable datasets released over multiple years - we're interested in helping these datasets bridge the chasm between data and information. It's one thing to be able to map crime incidents in a specific area between two dates. It's another thing to be able to look at some performance indicators of schools within these same areas. It's still another to be able to look at a low performing school and high performing school, and compare student to teacher ratios, the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced lunch, the number of crime reports in the neighborhood, the median income, the number of liquor licenses, and the percentage of owners to renters. By leveraging open datasets, we will enable more precise questions about how people learn, and the factors that affect learning.

In the upcoming days, weeks, and months, we will begin to document and release the beginnings of a toolkit designed to simplify building and maintaining web sites that use and display open data as it relates to education and learning. Drupal already has much of the functionality in place to support using open data, and the Drupal community can play a leading role in pushing the use of open data.

Our initial three targets include:

• Datasets: we will identify existing datasets, and document any needed steps required to prepare them for more widespread use.
• Map tiles: much of this data can be represented geographically, at the country level, the state level, or the local level. We will identify existing map data that can be used when developing location-based visualizations, and document the process of creating new map tiles. Any new map tiles we create will be released out under a Creative Commons license.
• Search and Visualization techniques: As we develop tools to import and manipulate datasets, we will need to search and filter this information, and make it comprehensible. This will likely result in new code that integrates various pre-existing open source visualization tools with the Views module. Any new code we develop will be released back onto Drupal.org

We hope that the process of looking at information related to learning will help people more effectively discover, understand, and explain the connections between student learning, school performance, the role of the teacher, and the relationship between all of these factors and the socioeconomic milieu in which they occur.

We also want more people to get involved. Toward that end, we have created a working group to discuss strategies and approaches for using open data - if you want to get started working in the space, join the group. Many hands make light work, and much of this work requires research and familiarity with how educational data is structured, as opposed to any hardcore coding or site building expertise.

Within the next few days, I'll have another post out that defines what we see as a starting point for the toolkit, and identify some of the tools that already exist that move us toward that point.