New education data platform and managed service standardizes current and past education data, making it available anywhere and in whatever form it's needed, safely and securely
ANDOVER, Mass., June 27, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Edsby®, an innovative vendor of K–12 education software, today introduced a system for helping learning organizations and governments eliminate silos between education data to ensure the right data about learners is always available to optimize their learning journeys.
Edsby's Unison™ education data platform and managed service is designed to ensure better education data quality and actionability across states, provinces and countries securely. Unison aggregates and standardizes current and past educational data and makes it interoperable while carefully managing the security critical with education data.
Customers use Unison for electronic student records that follow students through their education journeys. They also use it to transform education data from one type to another for application interoperability, or for region-wide learner analytics—all with strong roles-based access control to ensure only those authorized to access extremely sensitive data can do so.
National electronic student records in New Zealand
Unison forms the core of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's national learner repository and data exchange, termed Te Rito locally. Educators and government agencies in New Zealand found it hard to access valuable information about learners when they moved between the country's 2,536 schools. Information stayed locked in each school's systems or took a long time to obtain. Sometimes children didn't get the right support when they needed it. In 2018, the Ministry of Education selected what has become the Unison education data platform and began to work with Edsby to incorporate it.
"We heard needless stories of kids missing out on learning support like reading recovery, because by the time it was identified that they'd already been assessed for it, they were too old," said Lisa Cheney, Business Design Lead in a New Zealand Ministry of Education Te Rito video.
"Unison revolutionizes educator access to what used to be far-flung learner data," said Michael Middlemiss, former New Zealand Parliament CIO and Edsby Vice President, Unison. "The Ministry is now also deploying other secure applications based on Unison, including a national standardized Learner Support Registry (sLSR) to ensure children with learning needs get the support they're entitled to."
Unison interfaces with outdated and modern systems and uses a mix of secure open and proprietary standards to connect to data as needed.
Unlike bespoke approaches to converging a region's data, Unison cost-effectively enables a way to enforce security and data governance policies while also solving the problem of education software interoperability with bi-directional connections to data sources. Unison's core technology has safely managed the data of millions of students for more than 10 years. It has been certified to highest standards of data management, and has been aligned to leading privacy and data protection standards such as ISO 27001 and GDPR.
"Unison provides educators and policymakers a more accurate picture of student learning. It accelerates innovation in teaching and learning, lets regions ready their education data systems for the future and protects student data with industry-leading safeguards," said John Myers, CEO of Edsby. "Data always remains owned by the customer; it is only ever transformed and transported. It is never mined or otherwise monetized."
Unison is now generally available. Learn more about Unison here.
About Edsby
Edsby has been building award-winning software for education for over thirty years. Company founders include the original architects of FirstClass, a messaging and collaboration system used by millions of students and teachers around the world and credited as the original learning management system, or LMS. The company's close relationships with education customers over three decades have given it insights into problems faced by teachers, students, parents and administrators. This gave the team inspiration in 2010 to create a completely new digital learning and data foundation for K–12 districts, regional and national governments using latest software technology.
The unique needs of K–12 are hard to meet with conventional technologies and standards. Since 2010, Edsby has been on a mission to support K–12 teaching and learning with the next generation social technologies of its Edsby social learning platform and iron-clad student data stewardship in the company's underlying Unison education data system. Learn more at https://www.edsby.com.
Media Contact
Edsby, Edsby, (608) 216-7300, [email protected]
SOURCE Edsby
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