Planning and Procurement Guide for OneRoster ®

As schools and districts continue to shift to online learning resources, three significant barriers prevent the effective use of digital curriculum; the management of login credentials, provisioning of class rosters and grade results reporting.

Managing Login Credentials - Currently, teachers and students must interact with many different district-provided digital resources. More often than not, a unique username and password are required to gain access to the content. Keeping track of multiple user accounts is very time consuming and can be very frustrating for both teachers and student.
Managing Class Rosters - It is also common practice for a district to extract custom CSV files from the district’s Student Information System (SIS) or other system and upload them individually into a myriad of online tools, content, and platforms in order to pre‐provision user access to digital resources. Districts can no longer continue to generate proprietary file formats for students to access digital curriculum as this requires too much time and effort.
Managing Class Grade Results - Reporting grades from an LMS to the student system of record is time-consuming and error-prone. Why does this information need to captured in multiple systems? Well now, thanks to 1EdTech interoperability solutions, it doesn’t.

Solutions

To solve the class rostering and grade reporting challenges, 1EdTech and its members developed the OneRoster standard. K-12 districts identified the need for a single, unified format for exchanging roster information, leading to a significant improvement for teacher and student access and greatly reducing the impact on IT resources. Integrations with district and third-party systems put a strain on IT resources and often require custom API development and integration. The manual effort of daily and weekly updates of student information and start-of-school workloads are time-consuming and costly. OneRoster provides a standard way for school districts to securely publish class roster information and exchange grades between certified platforms. As a set of defined services and operations, OneRoster eliminates the need for custom integration work; allowing updates to be automated and the provisioning of new systems into the district’s ecosystem to be done within minutes, not days or even longer. The current version of OneRoster is OneRoster v1.2 though 1EdTech continues to support version 1.1 for the time being as well.

In addition to OneRoster, 1EdTech Consortium developed Learning Tools Interoperability^® (LTI^®) to address the login credential problem, establishing a standard way of integrating rich learning applications (installed locally or in “the cloud” and often provided through third-party services) with platforms like learning management systems, portals, or other educational environments, while allowing single sign-on to these tools. Thus, students and teachers are required to remember only one password—significantly reducing the barriers and frustrations of gaining access to digital resources. For more information about LTI, read the LearningTools Interoperability RFP Guidance and Checklist.

OneRoster Data Flow

The recommended version of the standard is OneRoster 1.2 which gives the ability to exchange class resources and to separately receive grades in return. OneRoster Resources, OneRoster Gradebook Results, and the Assessment Results Profile are separately certified features.

OneRoster 1.2 adds the ability to map one user to multiple roles as well as adding new metadata to the user record. It also greatly increases OneRosters results reporting functionality including the ability to align results to learning standards.

Two Methods of Exchange - OneRoster provides a powerful services model with two methods of data exchange, designed to meet the needs of each district. The CSV exchange uses the common spreadsheet-form file export and import in a consistent and easy-to-adopt form for legacy systems. The REST API method is a modern web-service that directly connects the provider and consumer, eliminating the need to run a separate import-export.

OneRoster Exchange

The REST Class Roster services include: AcademicSession Class Course Demographic Data Enrollments Org Users, Students, Teachers	The REST Gradebook Results services include: Line Items Line Item Categories Results Score Scales* Assessment Line Items* Assessment Results* Learning Objectives*	The REST Resources services include: Class Resources User Resources
The CSV Class Roster files include: academicSessions.csv classes.csv orgs.csv users.csv courses.csv demographics.csv enrollments.csv roles.csv* userProfiles.csv*	The CSV Gradebook Results files include: categories.csv lineItems.csv results.csv scoreScales.csv* lineItemLearningObjectiveIds.csv* lineItemScoreScales.csv* resultLearningObjectiveIds.csv* resultScoreScales.csv*	The CSV Resources files include: classResources.csv courseResourses.csv resources.csv userResources.csv*

* denotes new in OneRoster v1.2

Suggested Language for Procurement and RFPs

1EdTech provides Conformance Certification for its specifications. That means that 1EdTech will guarantee certified products will interoperate as described in the specification. Should an issue arise, 1EdTech staff work directly with the product supplier to identify and correct the issues.

Districts should require mandatory product certification to ensure their products support the latest convenient features of OneRoster. Here is the recommended language for a district’s RFP:

The District is requesting 1EdTech certified support for OneRoster version 1.2. In the case where they currently support and are certified for OneRoster version 1.1, please provide a timeline for upgrading to the most recent version.
Evidence of a valid conformance certification, including a current registration number, must be available from the 1EdTech web site. The official listing of conformance certifications registration numbers can be found at http://www.imscert.org

OneRoster Requirements Checklist

Following are recommended criterion in your RFP requirements checklist:

Please specify the OneRoster Method(s) of Exchange supported:	☐ CSV Format ☐ REST API Services
Please specify which version of OneRoster supported:	☐ OneRoster v1.2 ☐ OneRoster v1.1
Please specify your OneRoster Product Type:	☐ Provider ☐ Consumer ☐ Aggregator
Do you provide certified support for OneRoster Resources?	☐ Yes ☐ No
Do you provide certified support for OneRoster Gradebook Results?	☐ Yes ☐ No
Do you provide certified support for OneRoster Assessment Results Profile of the Gradebook Service?	☐ Yes ☐ No
What is your 1EdTech OneRoster conformance Certification Number?	________________
If you are publishing data will you be providing Demographics data?	☐ Yes ☐ No
Do you support the import and/or export of CSV data?	☐ Yes ☐ No