Product Bulletin 105 - Edsby Import of Custom Expectations/Standards/Outcomes

Mar 22nd, 2016

Background

Many organizations are embracing the practice of tracking student progress in a particular subject to a defined set of descriptive items. The term used to refer to these items varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and is usually one of: “Expectations”, “Standards” or “Outcomes”.

Edsby provides a powerful and convenient way for teachers to view the set of items that are relevant for each subject they are teaching, and to tie course plan material such as assessments and lessons back to the applicable expectations/standards/outcomes. Edsby provides other great features based on this information including coverage maps (that enable teachers to see which of the items they’ve covered so far) and per-student based progress tied back to these items.

Typically these expectations/standards/outcomes are defined by at the provincial/state/national level and are applied in a consistent way for all education organizations within the jurisdiction. Edsby has a well-defined process for importing this information and automatically linking it in to each class.

There are situations in which an education organization may wish to define and have supplied their own set of expectations/standards/outcomes. These include:

To provide coverage for subjects not formally defined by the jurisdiction
To modify the information provided by the jurisdiction to provide local adaptations
To cover the case where there are no externally supplied information

Edsby provides a way for an education organization to define its own set of expectations/standards/outcomes and have these imported into Edsby for use by teachers. This document describes the data format that Edsby uses for the import of this information.

Data Format

The data that defines expectations/standards/outcomes can be supplied in a straightforward CSV file format. An example is:

A description of each field is as follows:

Field	Description
SchoolID	This field is used to designate the scope of applicability of the supplied data. It can indicate the entire organization (usually denoted by “0”) or it can be limited to a specific school by supplying the SchoolID of the school (as defined in the Student Information System).
Region	This field denotes the jurisdiction or source of the expectation/standard/outcome
CourseID	This field contains compound data (“region.level.subjectID”) as follows: “region” is the same as the Region field (column B) “level” corresponds to the grade level (e.g. “1” for grade 1) “subjectID” corresponds to the subject code as defined in the course map defined for this organization. Edsby generally provides a course map to take specific course codes used in your SIS and map them to more generic subjectIDs that can be used for things like loading up strands, expectations/standards and so on.
ItemType	For loading up standards/expectations/outcomes this field should always be set to “Document.LearningStandard”
Name	This is the name used for the “code” of the expectation/standard/outcome
Body	This is the detailed text description of the expectation/standard/outcome

Importing Supplied Data

Customer-defined learning expectations/standards/outcomes can be imported into your Edsby system by your Edsby customer support representative. Please contact support to have this done.