Project Name: ELO (Educator Licensing Online)

Project Description:

In May 2010, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) won a three-year ARRA State Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) grant to support accountability. As greater emphasis is placed on teacher quality, training, and professional development data, the limitations of Wisconsin’s aging teacher licensing system have become increasingly apparent. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction recognizes the need for readily available and reliable information about the educators in our state. In addition, DPI values and strives for efficient processes in office operations. DPI intends to address both of these objectives by seeking to implement a new online educator licensure system which will result in greater data integrity, a more cohesive and reliable structure within current data collections, easier-to-access data, and valuable connections between DPI and educators, institutions of higher education, our Cooperative Educational Service Agencies, and 424 school districts in Wisconsin.

The DPI also acknowledges the need to have an online licensing system that meets the needs of the licensure applicants themselves. These needs include:

1. The ability of applicants to provide all necessary application data in one online submission based on the type of license(s) for which they are applying.
2. The ability to track the processing of their licensure application.
3. The ability to obtain information related to their specific questions around next steps in the license renewal process.
4. The ability to review and update personal data (e.g. address changes) as needed.

Ultimately, the new system will significantly improve the DPI licensure review process in order to reduce the application processing time and provide a more timely response to each applicant.

Project Objectives:

The overall objectives for the Educator Licensing Online initiative is to provide a cost-effective, integrated system that will:

1. Improve data quality, exchange, and accessibility for education institutions to be able to certify program completers
2. Provide an online portal for educators to apply for new licensure, a renewal or a change to existing licensure, and track the status of their application
3. Enable the electronic exchange of data in support of the Educator Licensing processes with the objective of reducing cycle time and manual or redundant data entry
4. Collect necessary and appropriate data that can be incorporated into the data warehouse to enable research and answer key policy questions
5. Enable internal DPI staff to efficiently and effectively manage the data capture, validation, and workflow supporting critical processes for Educator Licensing thereby reducing cycle time, data redundancy, and errors
6. Provide clean, manageable data to improve the reporting capacity within the department to satisfy Federal reporting requirements
7. Enable data exchange and data sharing with external partners in support of Educator Licensing
8. Reduce the cycle time, paper documents, and manual processes necessary to process an application for educator licensing
9. Transition from a document-driven to a data-driven organization
10. Eliminate obsolete technologies and disparate systems within Teacher Education, Professional Development and Licensing (TEPDL)
11. Enable capture of quality data that support metrics to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of processes supporting Educator Licensing

Current Phase:

Due to the size and complexity of the project, the project is broken into multiple phases. The project team is currently working on Phase 1 of the project. The specific objectives for Phase 1 are:

1. Gather and document Business Requirements
2. Create a Request for Proposal (RFP) to assess options for utilizing technology in TEPDL to improve the flow of work and data capture for Educator Licensing
3. Prioritize requirements to evaluate potential solutions and determine order of implementation
4. Determine Fit/Gap of potential solution options and select best fit solution

For questions about this information, contact Cindi Sin-Morner (608) 267-2402

Last updated on 1/27/2012 12:41:59 PM