Overview of Ed-Fi Standards and Technology

This page introduces the Ed-Fi Alliance's standards and software for technology providers. For the full list of what makes up the Ed-Fi Technology Suite today, see Ed-Fi Technology Suite Overview.

What is the Ed-Fi Alliance?

The Ed-Fi Alliance publishes data exchange standards for K-12 education data and leads an open-source software community that builds technology to implement them.

What is the Ed-Fi Data Standard?

The Ed-Fi Data Standard is focused on classroom-level decision making. It lets data move across many domains, including assessment, enrollment, attendance, grades, and demographics, which in turn helps educators improve student outcomes.

For technology providers, the standard takes shape mainly as the Ed-Fi REST API Specifications. Education agencies deploy an Ed-Fi API that implements these specifications, which gives your product one common API surface to integrate with instead of a custom extract for each agency. See Data Exchange Standards for all the standards the Ed-Fi Alliance publishes.

The standard and the technology are separate

The Data Standard and the technology that implements it are two separate things. The Ed-Fi Alliance builds two API platforms, the Ed-Fi ODS/API and Ed-Fi API v8; see Ed-Fi API Platforms. These platforms implement the API specifications; they are not the specifications themselves. Any system may implement the API specifications using different technology. See Ed-Fi Data Standard vs. UDM vs. API Specifications vs. Ed-Fi API for how the standards and the software that implements them relate.

Build your integration to the specifications, and test it against the platforms your customers run. See Should a new Ed-Fi implementation use ODS/API 7.x or Ed-Fi API v8? for what client application developers should test.