Working Group Title: Education Architecture

Introduction

Education today is an experience that spans multiple, traditional education segments and that is lifelong and lifewide. Digital tools have enabled students to curate personalized learning paths based on their individual interests and needs, earning credentials, badges, and certifications from an increasingly diverse set of learning providers. These tools also have the potential to empower the most traditionally disadvantaged of students by giving them ownership of these achievements and the ability to display these as they pursue their goals in a changing workforce.

Hyperledger’s extensibility is an enabling technology tool that can form one part of the foundation of educational transformation. As an anchor of a student-centered record, it can to integrate, extend, and enhance, existing institutional applications, processes, and workflows.
The Education Architecture Group will explore and advise on issues related to integration with legacy application infrastructure of learning management systems (LMS), Student Information Systems (SIS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Integrated Library Systems (ILS), Instructional Apps, Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Cloud Computing models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Hybrid), and self-sovereign digital identity. In addition, this group will investigate the integration of data across the multiple institutional, informal, and workplace learning experiences in the student’s lifetime of learning, and whether these can be integrated into a comprehensive record of an individual’s knowledge, skills, and ability.

Goals of the Hyperledger Working Group for Education Architecture:

• Explore and showcase key educational use cases
• Foster collaborations between academic institutions, policymakers, vendors, and other education stakeholders
• Create open source, shareable assets to reduce barriers to entry and adoption for education stakeholders
•  Develop and promote the adoption of important interoperability standards in APIs and protocols for education use cases, including from standards bodies such as: IMS Global Learning Consortium, IEEE, W3C, PESC, etc.
•  Curate or develop professional development or technical assistance resources to support educational practitioners on approaches to applying blockchain technology across various educational use cases

Please provide an introduction that addresses why the working group is required and what are the main goals and objectives of the group.

• There is a growing interest in educational use cases for blockchains, but currently no hyperledger-based community of interest (SIG) that focuses on assets for these stakeholders
• Opportunity to capture and focus local, regional, and national hyperledger blockchain initiatives at the intersection of education, employment, and workforce development
• Support educational institutions to make informed decisions on strategy and implementation of Hyperledger technologies
• Emerging standards are important to promote interoperability and cost savings across schools and systems, and to achieve long term policy goals
• Foster an open ecosystem of educational providers, publishers, technology vendors, policymakers, and practitioners

Scope

Please provide the scope and audience of the working group. Also, include items that are not within scope of this working group.  It’s as important to define the boundaries, to ensure a well-focused working group.

The Education Architecture working group is open to interested participants of all skill levels. In particular, this group will be comprised of institutional or individual participants across the education sector, including K12 school, districts, state entities, and institutions of higher education. In addition, individual instructors, researchers, students, entrepreneurs, investors, technology vendors, practitioners, artists, librarians, and policymakers are valuable participants.

The community will take initiative to specifically address

• Identify key use educational applications for Hyperledger technologies
•  Showcase case studies and success stories
•  Promote open interoperability standards
•  Explore and advise on key strategies for Hyperledger integration to critical campus applications
•  Promote open standards for distributed and digital credentialing 

Scope Not within Charter:
• Classroom technology
• Pedagogy
• Curriculum

Work Products-Output assets from the Working Group may include

• Use cases
• Case studies and success stories
• Best practices
• Interoperability and compliance Assets 
• Face-to-face events and meet-ups
• Podcasts or other social media engagement 
• Open source software requirements 

Collaborators (other groups)

The Education Architecture Working Group will collaborate with other existing or future Hyperledger working groups focused on Education and Training (curriculum focused).

The Education Architecture Working Group will also collaborate and share community development and standards work in credentialing and interoperability with appropriate standards bodies and groups interested in (1) DIDs; (2) data security; (3) privacy policy..

Other Industry Affiliations may include: We will reach out to other industry groups to determine their interest in participating.

Interested Parties

The following individuals have already expressed an interest in joining this working group, and we hope they will become contributors over the first year:
(List of interested parties listed with their consent, including name, association, and optionally email addresses)

TBD

Proposed Chair

The following individual has volunteered to serve as the initial interim Chair for the working group: 

TBD

Process of the Group

· Participation is open to everyone in the community
· Meetings will be held monthly via tele/virtual conference
· When needed a task force can be created and have separate working sessions to discuss specific work items.
· In person meetings at industry events and meetups

Transparency

The following proposed items will be created:
● Wiki
● Mailing List
● Rocket Chat
● Optional Github Repository
● Meeting Recordings will be stored in the Hyperledger Community Google Drive

Amendments

Changes to the charter may be proposed by active group members and, if it obtains rough consensus as determined by the Chair, can be brought forward to TSC.

Disbanding

Should the scope reach completion or conversely the traffic on the various conversation forums and the teleconference activity wither to very low levels, then the Chair of the WG may ask the TSC to disband the WG.

Running the Working Group

Responsibilities of a Chair

The chair is responsible for the following items:
● Sending agendas for meetings to make meetings more productive
● Ensuring that minutes are taken, including capturing list of participants. This does not mean that they will be responsible for taking the minutes, but rather that someone is taking the minutes
● Leading the meeting
● Sending out cancellation notices prior to the meeting
● Ensuring that working group updates to the TSC are done on a quarterly basis
● Facilitating the group and helping ensure that the goals and objectives are set
● Enforcing the Working Group’s adherence to the Hyperledger Code of Conduct

Minutes

Minutes for each meeting should be kept and accessible from the working group's wiki page on wiki.hyperledger.org. Members of the working group will need to decide who will keep notes.

Meeting Cadence

Working group plans to initiate cadence calls on a monthly basis.

Agendas

In advance of every meeting, the Chair should send out an agenda to both the Rocket.Chat and Mailing List to ensure that attendees know what will be discussed.

Cancelling a Meeting

Meetings are placed on the Hyperledger Community calendar. To ensure that the meeting can be removed, please send an email in advance of the meeting to zoom@hyperledger.org. In addition, please notify the mailing list and Rocket.Chat.

After Approval of Working Group

When a new working group gets approved, Hyperledger staff will ensure the following checklist is completed: 

❏ A Working Group Charter is created on the Hyperledger wiki based on the application, adding two lines ”Approved by the TSC on <date>” and “Implementing the standard working group process defined <here>”, linking to the right page on the wiki.
❏ Set up real-time chat channel for the working group. Channel should be named #{working-group-name}-wg.
❏ Set up the mailing lists for the working group. Use mailing list request form to create hyperledger-{working-group-name}-wg mailing list for this project.
❏ Set up a wiki page for the working group. Create a page at https://wiki.hyperledger.org/groups/{working-group-name}. The initial sections on the Wiki should include: Charter, Antitrust Policy Notification, Meeting Details, Communication Channels, Community Folder.
❏ Set up a community folder within the Hyperledger Community folder to store meeting recordings and other documents. Give permissions to the working group chair to edit.
❏ Set up a Zoom meeting id for hosting the working group meetings. This meeting should ensure that all meetings will be recorded to the cloud.
❏ Set up the quarterly working group reports for this working group. Add the working group to the quarterly working group schedule and working group updates page.
❏ Send Welcome Email Template
❏ Work with the working group lead to ensure that the community calendar is updated (Hyperledger Community calendar) to include the date/time of the meeting. IMPORTANT: Since a single Zoom account allows multiple IDs, but only one meeting can occur at the same time, ensure that the meeting day/time does not conflict with an existing community meeting.
❏ Send out calendar invite to the mailing list.