ISBE was awarded a grant via the Statewide Longitudinal Data System Grant Program in September of 2023. This four-year grant funds work that supports the Illinois Longitudinal Data System (ILDS). ISBE has a long-standing commitment of support for the ILDS and has used previous rounds of grant funding from the Institute of Education Sciences to build and maintain several cornerstone components of ISBE data infrastructure, including the ISBE Data Warehouse and My Data Dashboard.
The first year of the grant has been spent organizing, planning, designing, and putting a development team together. On January 1,2025, development will begin in earnest on DataVerse – a platform supporting expanded data access and improved documentation of data. The project team is targeting a phased release sometime in late 2025 or early 2026. Several core features include:
- A catalog-style collection of data elements, reports, datasets, and business rules that will allow flexible queries pertaining to all of the information ISBE that maintains.
- A query interface that will allow in-browser investigation of select datasets.
- Integrated history of metadata for dictionary definitions, business rules, etc.
- Modern data exchange tools, including credentialed endpoint access and modern file export formats like JSON.
- More to come!
We are excited to begin work on DataVerse because it gives YOU, the ISBE stakeholder, greater access to information necessary to improve the education of all students in the great state of Illinois. You will find regular updates posted here over the course of this project. There also will be opportunities to engage with this project, including providing feature feedback and early beta access for testing.
