EPIC

We recently developed and launched a centralized data warehouse and online reporting system for the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC)'s College and Career Ready program, which helps client districts and high schools analyze the nature and content of the high school instructional program. The reporting system is accessible to both EPIC staff as well as their clients, some of whom have access to the results from multiple schools. In order to simplify the user experience, we integrated the reporting system (built in .NET) with EPIC's existing web systems (built in PHP ) so that users could utilize a single sign-on to access all EPIC web applications. The online reports feature charts and tables based on data stored in an On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube generated through the data warehouse, which provides superior performance for the manipulation of large scale longitudinal data than traditional On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems. This performance allowed us to provide advanced features, such as ad-hoc filtering of reports based on multiple selection criteria with no noticeable drop in performance. To maintain the accuracy of the reporting system during periods of heavy data collection, we developed a nightly automated "extract, transform, and load" script that imports and validates data from EPIC's existing data collection systems.

Development of this system was complicated by the need to begin development while EPIC was still in the process of revising their data collection instruments. Our development team had to adjust quickly to changes in both the underlying data and reporting requirements to deliver an intuitive, informative, and useful reporting system.