EDUCATION INTELLIGENCE FIND OUT WHAT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE LOOKS LIKE IN EDUCATION AND HOW IT CAN BENEFIT YOUR DISTRICT OR AGENCY

Transcription

1 EDUCATION INTELLIGENCE FIND OUT WHAT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE LOOKS LIKE IN EDUCATION AND HOW IT CAN BENEFIT YOUR DISTRICT OR AGENCY

2 2 Hoonuit Education Intelligence An Introduction to Education Intelligence In just a few years, data analytics has become one of the most essential pieces of any successful organization s business strategy. From consumer preferences to employee performance to financial allocation and outcomes, swaths of data are collected and parsed each day in order to better inform and gauge a company s success. In turn, the demand for solutions that can organize and make sense of this data has driven the increasing popularity of business intelligence (BI) tools: software capable of converting unstructured data into actionable insights using intuitive visualizations and dashboards. Such tools make it easy for even the most data illiterate business leaders to stay informed and act in their company s best interests. Education may not be driven by the same pursuit of profit, but a school district s solvency is similarly tied to how it collects and analyzes data if not more so. Even when the economy is booming, public school districts must allocate limited state and federal funding wisely a near impossible task without data to tell them which expenditures are producing desired outcomes and which aren t. And unlike their corporate counterparts, school administrators aren t simply looking at the bottom line they re measuring the extent to which investments are improving student outcomes like academic improvement and student experience. District administrators looking to get more value out of the immense amount of data their schools produce and collect would do well to consider a form of business intelligence designed specially for their needs. We ll explain how BI for education or educational intelligence can transform the practices of any school district, and some early steps to consider for implementing it. In just a few years, data analytics has become one of the most essential pieces of any successful organization s strategy.

3 Hoonuit Education Intelligence 3 WHY EDUCATION INTELLIGENCE? It s one thing to argue that school districts, like any organization, could benefit from more intuitive and useful views of the data already in their possession. But what concrete benefits does educational intelligence offer these districts, and are they worth the investment? Let s begin by breaking down the six fundamental benefits that emerging data solutions offer districts, and consider just how great their impact could be on the experience of both staff and students.

4 4 Hoonuit Education Intelligence OPERATIONAL BENEFITS With so many buildings, departments, and individual staff members to manage, district leaders face the same difficulties in gaining visibility into daily operations that a Fortune 500 executive might but without the gigantic budget. That makes it nearly impossible for administrators to optimize critical operations like staffing and budget allocation, and adhere to state and federal reporting requirements upon which the district s funding depends. Financial Efficiency Districts often pour money into a wide variety of educational programs using only a few rudimentary metrics to assess their effectiveness. Educational intelligence platforms make it possible to measure how a given program or resource is affecting grades, student experience, graduation rates, and much more. Additionally, such tools would allow you to see these effects on the district, building, grade, or class levels. Staffing Classrooms tend to overcrowd in part because issues experienced by teachers at the building level rarely reach administrators at the district level. Clear and complete views of a district s student population makes it easy for administrators to understand how many teachers and in what disciplines they ll need to meet their students needs. It s also important for administrators to understand which teachers are most successful and which may need additional professional development in order to be more effective. By compiling and interpreting data across class sections, budget allocation, and student cohorts, educational intelligence solutions can hone in on the variables that most accurately indicate a teacher s performance.

5 Hoonuit Education Intelligence 5 State Reporting Even basic data on things like attendance, behavior, and coursework get lost in the shuffle between various district stakeholders when no intuitive data reporting framework is in place, and new federal legislation like ESSA has made the reporting process even more complicated. Educational intelligence platforms can synthesize data from disparate systems and across various departments to consolidate reports for the state department of education, making it easy for districts to claim as much federal and state funding as possible. STUDENT OUTCOMES Beyond the optimization of budget spend, educational leaders also want to understand how they can make students in their district more successful, more satisfied, and better prepared for life after graduation. Educational intelligence goes beyond districtlevel views of exam performance and graduation rates and allows district administrators to drill down at a school, grade, or individual student level to identify the root causes of issues like performance gaps or high transfer rates. Student Experience A good analytics platform for K-12 districts can not only pull in data from various information systems and databases, but will let you incorporate your own data and metrics, like the results from district surveys assessing student experience. Whether you re measuring overall student satisfaction with various schools or the success of particular programs, it s critical that you re able to factor your students feelings and needs into data-led district decisions.

6 6 Hoonuit Education Intelligence Academic Improvement ESSA and other federal and state requirements make additional funding conditional on a district s ability to improve academic performance, whether through state assessments, GPA, or other important indicators of student success. By consolidating all the various factors that define academic performance and allowing users to customize the way they view them, educational intelligence platforms offer administrators a thorough understanding of what obstacles to improvement exist and how they can be overcome. Improved Grad Rates The better you are able to understand student experience and academic performance, the easier it will become to improve graduation rates. Educational intelligence gives you all the resources you need to put together a complete picture of academic performance and do what s necessary to prepare students for professional life or higher education.

7 Hoonuit Education Intelligence 7 EDUCATION INTELLIGENCE VS. BI TOOLS Both educational intelligence tools and off-the-shelf BI tools can connect to a single data source, make that data easily accessible to end users, and provide helpful visualizations. But educators have needs that are entirely unique, and therefore require tools designed specifically to meet those needs. To that end, there are several educationspecific capabilities that education intelligence platforms possess that BI tools do not. For example, while BI tools can typically be manipulated to connect to one or even several data streams at a time, they re simply not built to accommodate all of the siloed, disparate data sources needed to create a comprehensive picture of any school district s operations. That means educators attempting to use a traditional BI tool must dedicate themselves to the time-intensive setup and continued maintenance of platforms that aren t designed with their district s needs in mind. Using pre-built connectors, educational intelligence tools seamlessly unite a district s varied data sources into a series of intuitive, workflow-embedded data dashboards that simplify complicated, industry-specific processes like ESSA reporting. Educational intelligence platforms can also leverage robust, prebuilt cohort functionalities to analyze specific groups of students or staff members. Based on those analyses, educational intelligence tools offer integrated PD and research-based recommendations that enable teachers to act on those insights. These are just a few examples of the ways in which educators can benefit from tools custom-built for their profession but this doesn t mean that educators should throw out whatever BI programs they ve already invested in. In fact, BI tools can be leveraged in tandem with educational intelligence tools, wherein the educational intelligence platform serves as the data-driven foundation of a district s tech stack and enables the BI tool s capabilities.

8 8 Hoonuit Education Intelligence CONSIDERSATIONS WHEN CHOOSING A VENDOR While educational intelligence is a relatively new development within the EdTech sector, many companies have already begun to crowd the market with dashboards and data visualization tools. Because the field is so new and because most district stakeholders aren t necessarily familiar with the field of analytics, it can be challenging to select the right educational intelligence partner. There are a few things beyond price point that every district should consider when choosing the right educational intelligence tool, however. These five capabilities could make all the difference between a better, more efficiently run district and just another tech-led initiative that fails to take off among educators. 1. A Complete Picture of Your Data The problem with most districts solutions for collecting and analyzing data today is that the data itself is scattered across disparate software systems, requiring hours of busywork to thread the right pieces together before district leadership can make a decision. If your educational intelligence platform is missing large swaths of information, how much of an improvement does it really represent?

9 Hoonuit Education Intelligence 9 2. Intuitive Data Views No software solution, no matter how powerful, is going to gain traction with district stakeholders if it isn t easy to use and understand. Educators should be able to choose from a variety of premade views mobile-friendly views for teachers to use in classroom workflow, desktop views for administrators, etc. and have the option to customize their own views if and when the need arises. 3. Empowers Fact-Based Decision-Making Charts and graphs are all well and good, but if they don t give clear, actionable insights as to how you might improve performance, optimize the allocation of funding, and make other critical decisions for your district, they offer little to administrators and educators. Data is only helpful if it can offer solutions and inform decisions, which means that your analytics engine should be capable not only of visualizing the information you feed it, but actually drawing conclusions from it. 4. Leverages Predictive Analytics Getting a read on the current status of your district is one thing, but what about the trends that will affect that status in the future? A truly advanced educational intelligence vendor will reach deep back into your school or district s historical data and leverage it to make reliable predictions about the future. This could enable you to proactively intervene when students are showing warning signs of dropping out, to preemptively raise staff numbers before a population shift or redistricting move brings a new influx of students, or even help ensure that students are positioned for post-graduate success.

10 10 Hoonuit Education Intelligence 5. Built For Educators Select an education intelligence tool that is contextually relevant for education. Solutions designed for delivering on the promise of educational intelligence have ETLs, Data Warehouse, Data Models and Visualizations designed to address nuances with education data to maximize time-tovalue, ROI and impact. This includes requirements like interoperability with education systems, business rules to accommodate missing or inconsistent identifiers to uniquely identify student records to tie data together from various source systems, disparate definitions and calculations of the same metric like attendance, state and federal requirements like small cell suppression rules, row and column level security, extensible data model to accommodate every data element that represents the whole child, staff, family and other relevant data domains. 6. Powered by the Cloud As a K-12 school district, state education department, or another education agency, your resources are spread thin. Hosting your education intelligence programs in the cloud enhances your district s ability to efficiently scale operations and securely store information. What s more, cloud storage enables users to securely access the information they need from any device not only the device to which a module or visualization is saved. Hoonuit has established an alliance with Microsoft. Hoonuit s hosted data and analytics solutions delivered through Microsoft Azure enable education administrators to facilitate accountability reporting, support educators in the decision-making process, and maximize student success. Now through its work with Microsoft, K-12 school districts, state education departments, and other education agencies can run Hoonuit's data programs in the cloud with the speed, scale, and security needed to adhere to changing education policy and constantly adapt to meet students' needs.

11 Hoonuit Education Intelligence 11 HOONUIT FOR EDUCATION INTELLIGENCE What unites educators is a desire to see every student excel and, ultimately, leave high school as an engaged and educated citizen. Educational data can support the work of teachers and administrators as they improve efficiency, meet reporting requirements, and most importantly, enable student performance. To that end, district administrators are looking to get more value out of the data their schools produce, and leverage that data as a vehicle for positive change in their communities. Hoonuit Data Analytics powered by Microsoft Azure offers some of the most advanced education intelligence solutions in the industry. To find out more about our dashboards and analytics platform for essential data management, early warning and intervention, social emotional learning, college and career readiness, and operations in educational, request a today. Hoonuit provides educators with datadriven role-based dashboards paired with intuitive ad-hoc reporting tools to help improve decision-making. Request a demo today! Address 210 West College Avenue Appleton, WI USA Phone Website essential-data-management