Ten years ago when MSIX first went into production, I figured lots of states would want to begin importing data into MIS2000 for the express purpose of sending it on to MSIX, particularly Course History and Assessment data which isn't nearly as useful to the sending state as the receiving state, so many of them weren't doing a great job of collecting it. If you had told me then that I'd still be putting lots of effort into developing these import processes ten years later, I wouldn't have believed you, but it's true. I wanted to spend a blog post talking about the current state of this development and who is doing what. Early on, quite a few states had us develop simple, manual imports that they could run once in a while whenever they got data from wherever they could get it. I think we did some imports like this for Alaska and Kentucky and Lousiana and several others.

But since then as the flow of data has gotten more consistent and automated, imports like what we did for South Dakota several years ago became possible. Their import gets a weekly dump of data from their state student data warehouse that includes files for Course History, Assessments, and even some student level data like IEP and LEP. But the real key is that the data arrives like clockwork and the whole system runs with very little human involvement. That was really the first import we did like that. Since then, we've done similar, really comprehensive automated imports for Arizona, Hawaii, and Kentucky. And we've built new systems to monitor these imports and to let us know they're running properly and effectively.

Quite a few other states have some level of support for imports, either completed or in development, but I think most do not. Some of the ones in development right now are Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Since all of this work winds up being completely custom for each state, there are always some extra development costs involved, often more on the DOE side than the MEP side, so keep that in mind. But if you'd like to look into your options, we'd like to talk with you about it. Just bear in mind that some of these projects have gotten ridiculously complicated and have actually taken years to fully play out. Prepare yourself for a deep dive and don't expect to be an overnight success!