Embedded Dashboards for Smarter Education Systems
Introduction
A rising number of institutions, professors, and administrators are seeing the potential of better using their learning management system’s massive and ever-growing data collection. This data is frequently left underutilized on servers and databases, despite the fact that it has the ability to advance a variety of practical and theoretical needs for a number of stakeholders.
Embedding analytics solutions in your applications helps you to use your data collection properly. Bold BI enables you to break down the data silos and monitor strategy outcomes, allowing you to improve students’ learning process, leading to better grades, track student and teacher attendance, and track their performance over time. In this blog post, I will give you a walkthrough on embedded analytics and how an analytics dashboard will help make educational institutions smarter.
What is embedded analytics?
Integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability is known as embedded analytics. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It also enables you to reduce dependency on IT teams and pick out the data patterns you need to improve academic, administrative, and workforce outcomes.
How embedding analytics benefits educational institutions
A well-managed analytics platform can help educational institutions increase administrative effectiveness and efficiency, academic performance, and the experience and satisfaction of students and teachers.
Course analysis and personalized learning experience
Embedded analytics makes it easier for professors and administrators to analyze the performance of their programs within their websites. It helps them to evaluate the quality of the courses by comparing them using various charts, drilling down to details like specific staff, students, and course-level data. Administrators can use embedded analytics to learn which classes are the most interesting to students, find out the root causes of poor results, and examine student qualities or participation patterns linked to program retention using various key metrics such as average subject score and examination results by branch. Professors can tailor their courses, if necessary, to improve the learning experience for students.
Leading academic outcomes
Embedding analytics helps administrators monitor key metrics like faculty-to-student ratio, exam results, and student attendance, which enable them to identify student preference and performance patterns over time. It allows professors to modify a curriculum and subject to improve student results and retention rates. Administrators can monitor student enrollment trends over time and predict the upcoming year’s enrollment with the help of predictive analytics. They can identify an institution facilities’ shortcomings and take preventive measures like arranging adequate transportation and boarding facilities.
Administrative effectiveness
Embedded analytics helps administrators track important KPIs such as administrative spending per student, enrollment details, and yearly operating budget. Using these metrics, administrators can analyze their spending habits, marketing campaigns’ performance, etc. They can devise plans to reduce unwanted expenses, preplan their budget, initiate new schemes, recruit new staff, and attract more admission applications.
Better workforce management
Running an educational institution is not easy, as it involves various tasks such as maintaining the university campus, grounds, dorms, class schedules, labs, admissions, and so much more. Embedding analytics into your application helps you effectively monitor day-to-day operations, recruit adequate staff, and schedule their work times. It will create a positive environment for students and professors, which in turn increases performance and course completion rate. It will also help as passive marketing. Therefore, the admission rate will eventually increase.
How to embed analytics tools in your educational domain application
Let’s see how these analytics can be embedded into your application. Bold BI helps you embed dashboards in your apps in 12 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, and Vue with ASP.NET Core. In the remainder of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario in which your company has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI Embedded and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully in an Angular application.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.
Step 1: Create an Angular application.
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, you first need to create an Angular application. Create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary TS files to the project, as shown in the following image.
For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.
In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file, as shown in the following table and screenshot.
RootUrl: Bold BI dashboard server URL. Example: http://localhost:58094/bi.SiteIdentifier: For Bold BI Enterprise, it should follow the format `site/site1`. For Bold BI Cloud, it should be an empty string.Environment: Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI Enterprise, you should use `enterprise`.apiHost: An ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:5000/, which needs to be set as `apiHost`.
After adding these properties, we need to create the Bold BI instance.
Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance.
After the Angular web application is created, you need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server side (any web application) and the client side (the Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.
Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server.
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signatures. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI Embedded instance.
Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard.
In the Angular application, update the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Bold BI’s educational dashboard examples
Student Performance Dashboard
By embedding the Student Performance Dashboard, you can visualize the various aspects of a student’s details that are helpful for professors and administration. The metrics include attendance details, performance with respect to various subjects, average subject scores, etc.
Key metrics and KPIs
- Avg. subject score: Shows the average score in each subject earned by students.
- Student count by grade and gender: Shows the number of students based on grade and gender using drill down.
- Examination results by branch: Shows the examination results of students by academic branch.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Student Performance Dashboard example.
Higher Education Enrollment and Retention Dashboard
By embedding the Higher Education Enrollment and Retention dashboard, you can visualize the critical KPIs related to your university students’ enrollment based on their ethnicity, courses, gender, and age. You can monitor the metrics that include student attendance, course completion rate, freshman retention rate, teacher-to-student ratio, and more.
Key metrics and KPIs
- Student attendance percentage: Shows the percentage of overall student attendance.
- Course completion rate: Shows the percentage of students who successfully completed their courses.
- Freshman retention rate: Shows the percentage of students retained in the same institution.
- Teacher-to-student ratio: Shows the number of students divided by professors in an institution.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Higher Education Enrollment and Retention Dashboard demo.
School Performance Dashboard
By embedding the School Performance Dashboard, you can monitor important KPIs related to attendance details of faculty and students, details about faculty, academic performance, retention rate of students and faculty, faculty-to-student ratio, student enrollment details, and more.
Key metrics and KPIs
- Students retention rate: Shows the percentage of students who will continue their education in this same school next year consecutively.
- Faculty retention rate: Shows the percentage of Faculty who will continue their work in this same school next year consecutively.
- Student enrollment details: Shows the student enrollment details (number of students) by academic year.
- Mode of transit-students: Shows the count of students based on their mode of transit to come to the school.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the School Performance Dashboard example.
K-12 Enrollment Dashboard
By embedding the K-12 Enrollment Dashboard, you can easily track enrollment trends, student-to-faculty ratios, top 5 districts for enrollment, student acceleration, and the operating budget of each school. This gives a comprehensive view of the performance of each institution and student body. You can also forecast enrollment for the next three years.
Key metrics and KPIs
- Faculty-to-student ratio: Shows the ratio of teachers available for students.
- Enrollment trends: Forecasts the enrollment for the next three years based on previous years’ enrollment.
- Top 5 school districts by enrollment: Shows the top 5 enrolling school districts.
- Students in acceleration program: Shows the count of students taking advanced courses by year.
- Operating budget per year: Shows the operating budgets for the schools by year.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the K-12 Enrollment Dashboard demo.
Conclusion
Bold BI Embedded helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards in your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope now you have a better understanding of Bold BI Embedded and how it will help educational institutions act smarter. You can create a dashboard as you like with Bold BI Embedded’s 35 widgets and 130 data sources.
To get started with Bold BI, schedule a free 30-minute demo with our experts about creating dashboards and any other features you would like to learn more about. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on December 3, 2021.
