Introducing Education Intelligence
2017 was the wild west for EdTech. The volume of under-qualified and unqualified solutions (and people) thrust upon educators throughout the year made many rethink their roles and voices, particularly about how both are leveraged at the intersection of education and technology. Still, the number of digital tools and cloud-based technologies looking for their corner of the classroom market continued to balloon. Seemingly, the only thing that inflated faster were the marketing claims and ploys they use in their Go-to-Classroom strategies. These tools and their claims seem not to understand that they have a responsibility to their customers and users that live beyond the purchase.
This general lack of research and respect for the field of education and its frontline practitioners is nothing new in EdTech. It is one of the reasons that the theme of applied ethics got more EdTech airtime than equity, access, and efficacy in 2017. Take for example the “brainwave headset” makers trying to get into classrooms before it has been determined whether or not brainwave data would legally constitute education data, covered by FERPA, or medical data, covered by HIPAA, or both.
Responsible EdTechery requires that school districts, educators, and parents have these answers before students have devices or start generating data. And while we’re on the topic, responsible districts might want to go further, ensuring that products that toe this line have medical device insurance. It will likely be worth its weight in lawsuits to get definitive legal advice as to whether or not teachers who use such headsets in a classroom setting would be personally liable for misuse or mishaps. Teachers looking to join any “ambassador programs” (employed by many of these companies) or otherwise use a device like this without district approval will want to find out if these devices rise to the level of needing some form of personal medical malpractice insurance.
As tools and technology like this come in and out of focus for our education system, its stakeholders need more insight and less obstruction. Issues arising from technology’s proliferation into education are giving rise to harder questions and the majority of EdTech tools aren’t building solid answers because it isn’t profitable to do so, which leaves schools in a lurch. This imbalance is unfair because technology should be helping make our schools better by giving teachers more time for artful teaching. Instead, they are creating conditions for failure.
This work is vital and it can’t be done without clarity, which prompted us to ask:
“what would such a tool do for schools and districts?”
What would it look like if educators had tools that mirrored business intelligence software (Salesforce, Workday) but worked to serve the needs and context of schools districts and the students they serve? What would it look like if schools could understand exactly how a product or tool fit into their ecosystem? Who can see the data these tools produce? What would be possible if, instead of relying on black box algorithms, schools and districts could build their own, specific to their student populations.
These questions became foundational when we started to rebuild our software 2+ years ago from the ground up and we’re excited to share the brand new and much-improved Learnmetrics. Meet Learnmetrics V1, an Education Intelligence Platform.
What is Education Intelligence?
Education Intelligence is a process which turns all of your organization’s disparate data into end-to-end insights by enabling three toolkits.
Aggregation
Our aggregation toolkit enables you to map your entire EdTech genome. Know what tools are in play and for whom. Understand at-a-glance who has access to each of your systems and know what data they have access to. Quickly and easily navigate through any and all of your data from one place. Get rid of costly legacy systems by getting your data back under your control.
Real Use Case:
A medium-sized school district was struggling with making strategic decisions for their community. They wanted to build a data-driven culture through being able to see all their data in one place, have meaningful conversations about connecting data to practice, and making the most of insights, across all their systems.
Learnmetrics helped them to bring their systems together in a configurable dashboard and aided in creating a single source of truth which became a powerful tool as they navigated toward a truly data-driven culture.
Analysis
Our analysis toolkit enables you to customize your benchmarks, set custom tiers (RTI, MTSS), track goals, and extract insights rather than wrestle with Excel or doing the work manually. Take the raw data from your tools and bend it to your will. Create a shared vocabulary for your organization and use that vocabulary in an evergreen, partnership-based process for continuous improvement.
Real Use Case:
When a school district needed to connect their data to real-time action, the process of getting, managing, and manually entering the data from multiple sources was exhausting to everyone involved. With all the barriers and labor involved, they were finding the process took as many as 3 to 4 weeks once they had the raw data. By the time they got it formatted and entered, the data was too stale to have an impact on their students.
Learnmetrics turned their manual process into an automated workflow, automatically crunching the numbers that gave school leaders quick glimpses into who needed immediate attention, allowing them to track student progress closer to real-time, and refocusing staff efforts on student-centered initiatives instead of data mining.
Activation
Our activation toolkit lets you automate away the busy work, giving your team a digital personal assistant. Build automated workflows that serve in-time insights and elevate the practice of your educators. Save costs, save time, reinvest both in your schools.
Real Use Case:
A charter school with a highly diverse population was having a hard time determining appropriate literacy interventions, staffing, and curriculum because they didn’t have access to timely and accurate predictive or historical data. They couldn’t see how students had performed historically without significant time investments and were unable to tell midway through the year whether or not students were on track to meet their goals.
Through the Learnmetrics Platform, we aggregated historical data and combined that with current data to create visualizations that illuminated students’ trends over time. In addition, we created predictive formulas and corresponding visualizations that approximated which students were on pace to meet their end of year literacy goals and enabled teachers to act before it was too late to be helpful.
How Can I See How Learnmetrics Works?
Sign up for a tour here. We can’t wait to share it with you!
Not ready for a tour just yet? Follow along with our first blog series of 2018 — EdCheck Yourself Before You EdTech Yourself — as we build a playbook for getting the most out of your EdTech while avoiding the not-always-obvious pitfalls and vendor tricks.
Julian Miller
CEO & Co-Founder
julian@learnmetrics.com
