Australian A4L Community helping mobilise student data and supporting learners and teachers

WASHINGTON - Oct. 27, 2016 - PRLog -- The SIF Implementation Specification (Australia) 3.4 release reflects the continued engagement of the AU education technology community with the SIF standard, and contains several updates and enhancements that support the ongoing benefits end users have come to expect from the standard. Changes include updates for the Australian Schools List and additions requested by the Catholic Education Office Melbourne (ICON project) and the New South Wales Department of Education and Training (Family/Household) as well as changes to further support third party integration.  This release is an update to the SIF Implementation Specification (Australia) 1.4 and is only supported by the SIF 3.x (global) infrastructure.  It includes support for the latest national and jurisdictional projects as well as changes to the patterning of schemas to align with the global approach.

On the technical front this release now structures it's XSDs in a way that makes automatic generation of SIF-handling code easier and more reliable. This change to XSDs for SIF objects rather than for the data model as a whole also brings the distribution of SIF assets into alignment with SIF-US practices.

For the data-model itself, a wide variety of requested additions have been made which reflect the ongoing roll-out of SIF in the AU as a core foundation of the Learning Services Architecture; a National initiative that sees education organisations interfacing to the market of solution-providers with a common set of SIF-based interfaces.  These changes add additional capability around needs such as families and the real-world complexity of interacting with them; the variety of attendance reporting across different education sectors; and the ability to have teachers as well as students present in multiple timetables.  A full list of changes can be found in the release documentation, but the level of changes reflects the ongoing pro-active participation of the community in shaping and extending the standard in Australia.

"The new release shows how the A4L SIF standard is continuously developing to help Australian schools mobilise data and connect securely with online services provided by the various layers of Government and by commercial providers" states Trevor Hill, Chair, A4L Community Australian Management Board.  "Having an integrated single way of connecting systems easily via structured data means less time spent on integrating systems and more on supporting learners and teachers."

Plans for Release 3.4.1 and beyond are already underway, and recent workshops with the A4L Community in Australia have focused on Assessment and Wellbeing object suites, as well as formal SIF support for the Australian National Online Testing service (NAPLAN) which will go live for all schools in Australia in May 2017.

This is a significant milestone for the standard and the A4L Community in Australia, and we take great pride in the continued benefits that our stakeholders see in making the changes they need to ensure that SIF continues to deliver the benefits that they need.

The SIF Implementation Specification (Australia) 3.4 can be found on the A4L website: https://www.A4L.org/Specification/Pages/Australia/aspx

About the Access 4 Learning Community

There is no other global community made up of educational policymakers, marketplace product and service providers and the customers they serve, collaborating daily to address real word learning information and resource issues.

The Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community, previously the SIF Association, is a unique, non-profit collaboration composed of schools, districts, local authorities, states, US and International Ministries of Education, software vendors and consultants who collectively address all aspects of learning information management and access to support learning.  The A4L Community is "Powered by SIF" Specifications as its major technical tool to allow for this management and access 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 https://www.A4L.org