Connecting the Dots: An Open Education Data Standard for Student Success

Higher education institutions often depend on a sprawling ed tech stack built on proprietary, opaque data models. This fragmentation creates costly one-off pipelines and deepens closed system lock-in. When data structures are closed and inconsistent, campuses can’t easily switch tools or build software that travels across institutions. It also limits a shared understanding of meaning around student success. 

This session explores how an open source, modular data infrastructure that enables student success data portability can enable turning holistic data into supportive action. In this session, we present a practical infrastructure framework for staging, mapping, and transformation, and the community built around it. We will walk through a deployable open data model and associated infrastructure based on four pillars of trust: modular pipelines for institutional autonomy, public-versioned code, standardized data dictionaries, and schema lineage tracking. This infrastructure is a community-led public good that complements existing institutional systems and standards, and we will close with an invitation to join this community. Attendees will learn how to access open source public good data infrastructure for student success; opportunities to engage with this work; frameworks for evaluating data models and infrastructure for deployment across campus systems; and cross-functional strategies to bridge technical architecture with IR reporting and strategic decision-making.