Introducing the Access 4 Learning Community

WASHINGTON - May 20, 2015 - PRLog -- The SIF Association is proud to announce the leveraging the 18 years of this volunteer community’s experience in the identification, management and movement of educational data to now focus on the usage of that data as true learning information for parents, practitioners and learners themselves!  To do that, the Community is excited to gather under a new banner – the Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community!

“The great thing about the Access 4 Learning Community is that it brings together policymakers, IT specialists, vendors and importantly educators who volunteer to work on solving the issues with data management and access to systems that enable increased engagement from learners in the classroom and elsewhere” touts Trevor Hill, Director IT Services and eStrategy
Department of Education, Tasmania AU and co-Chair of the A4L Community Board of Directors.  “The Access 4 Learning Community heightens this work built upon the sound interoperability foundations of the SIF Specifications.”

The Community will still be “powered by the SIF Specifications” – the most comprehensive data model and mature infrastructure interoperability framework in use globally in education.  The Community will continue to identification of “data management pain points” but driven by this huge community of volunteers at all levels of the sector, the conversations need to evolve past management.

The Community determined it is a perfect time for this name change as they are also very proud to release real-world examples of their work in use by schools, government entities and even the vendor community.  Also released today is:

SIF Global Infrastructure Implementation Specification 3.1: REST-Based infrastructure with simpler authentication, JSON support, optional utilities, and additional query support

SIF Data Model Implementation Specification (North America) 3.3: Additional 2x Data Model object additions, continued alignment with CEDS, Student Record Exchange objects, and the addition of SIF xPress objects

SIF xPress: A suite of APIs that are designed to provide a standard template for interoperability for specific, high-value use cases. The first two releases are Roster and Student Records Exchange.

A4L Privacy Task Force Artifacts v1: A great effective practice resource covering data object privacy classification, privacy use case templates with examples and data breech template.

Larry Fruth II, PhD, CEO/Executive Director at the A4L Community states “As an educator, policymaker, and most importantly as a parent, I am thrilled that the Access 4 Learning Community will still be addressing critical data management issues that still exist but show how the conversations can move past management to its usage in the classroom to impact learners.  I am passionate about that and so is our Community.”

Additional information on the new face for the community, these various products release for free usage along with webinars for a more detailed dive, and what it all means for the education sector can be found at the new web site: www.A4L.org.

About the Access 4 Learning Community

The Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community is a unique, non-profit collaboration composed of over 3,200 schools, districts, local authorities, states, US and International Ministries of Education, software vendors and consultants who collectively define the rules and regulations for educational software data interoperability. The Community collaborates to be “powered by the SIF Specifications” that enable diverse applications to interact and share learning information simply, securely, and in a scalable, standard way regardless of the platform hosting those applications. The Access 4 Learning Community has united these education technology end users and providers in an unprecedented effort to give teachers more time to do what they do best: teach. For further information, visit www.A4L.org.