Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


SIF Association Remakes Itself to Focus on Data Usage in Schools

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 06/02/15

The SIF Association, which for 18 years has stoked the data sharing specification behind the Schools Interoperability Framework, is moving on. The organization has taken a new name — Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community — and a new focus, shifting from identification, management and movement of data to use of data.

The community is a blend of schools, regional support operations, government agencies and vendors that come together to lay out the technical blueprints for enabling products and services to work with and share educational data.

Along with the makeover, the organization has also updated several aspects of its specifications.

  • A new version of the global implementation of the SIF Infrastructure specification has been released with an emphasis on simplicity. Version 3.1 provides for simpler authentication through stronger single sign-on; simpler app support with JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight data-interchange format; expanded query support with fewer HTTP headers; and simpler navigation.
  • The SIF Data Model specification, applicable to users in North America, has been updated to version 3.3, which implements several new objects that underpin two new APIs, xPress Roster and xPress Student Record Exchange.
  • Data Privacy Artifacts: Version 1 of this new resource was developed by an A4L task force that examines end user issues related to ensuring privacy for student data as well as staff and parental data. A 31-page report offers a "data breach" template to be used by end users should a vendor data breach occur; it also offers a student data privacy use case template to show people how to define who should have access to specific types of data.

"As an educator, policymaker, and most importantly as a parent, I am thrilled that the Access 4 Learning Community will 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," said Larry Fruth, II, CEO and executive director at the A4L Community.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • large cloud icon with abstract code and interconnected polygons

    Report: Enterprise AI Workloads Are Tipping Toward Private Cloud

    Broadcom's 2026 Private Coud Outlook report says enterprise AI is moving from experimentation into production, with private cloud emerging as the preferred deployment environment for AI inference among surveyed organizations.

  • digital brain integrating legal regulation and security interface

    Survey: Agentic AI Moves from Pilot Phase to Production, Bringing Governance to the Forefront

    A new report from Caylent, an AI-focused Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Services Partner, found that enterprises are already moving agentic AI beyond pilots and into production environments. At the same time, organizations are putting strict conditions around autonomy, making governance and control the next major challenge for enterprise AI adoption.

  • Young Woman Programmer Uses Laptop To Analyze Neural Network Models

    AI Leaders Warn of Risks at United Nations Security Council Briefing

    The heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face recently joined AI researcher Yoshua Bengio at the United Nations headquarters in New York to warn the UN Security Council about the security risks of increasingly capable AI.

  • abstract smartphone translucent screen displaying AI interface

    Apple Unveils Redesigned Siri AI

    At its recent Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced Siri AI, a redesigned version of its voice assistant that Apple describes in its own announcement as "a profoundly more capable and personal assistant." The update is intended to make Siri more conversational, more context-aware, and more useful across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro.