Evolution of Edurio — Building a system to meet the needs of a government education agency
ICYMI: In the previous post in this series, Penelope Tainton gave a glowing review of Edurio and why she and Western Cape Government chose to work with us on monitoring and evaluating their Game Changer inititatives.
You’ll be wondering now if we can actually live up to the hype…
So now it’s our turn to share all the progress we’ve made these last few months and how Edurio has evolved to meet the needs of Western Cape.
*if you haven’t read Penny’s first 3 posts, they will give you all the information you need on the 3 education-focused Game Changers, as well as some fascinating historical context: Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3
The team at Western Cape had some clear needs and requests as we began collaborating on the Game Changers. As we learned more about the challenges they faced, we teamed up to collaborate on more innovations and new solutions. It has been exciting to see so much progress in such a short time and we believe that working with Western Cape has helped set us on the right track to creating something really valuable not only for them but for education systems around the world.
So — what did Western Cape need to get the qualitative data they were looking for, administer surveys to the entire region and monitor progress of the Game Changers?
To ask certain questions to students based on whether or not they had participated in After School activities.
While still in the survey development phase in Spring 2017, we realised our survey question capabilities were too limited for Western Cape’s needs. They wanted some kind of skip logic to ask students the right questions based on their experiences.
We created a system of Conditional Survey Logic that will allow for a wide range of possibilities as it doesn’t just branch off at a given question to send respondents on a different path, but rather allows us to apply a condition based on any previous answer at any point during the survey.
To easily interpret survey responses by gender or other factors.
Edurio has always allowed users to filter survey data by class, teacher and subject, but to have a deep understanding of the impact of the Game Changers, Western Cape needs to be able to filter data based on a variety of other factors.
We took on the challenge of upping our data analysis game and came up with Custom Tags, which allow users to disaggregate survey response data by any number of customised student subgroups.
Addressing inequalities in education is a key priority for Western Cape, as it is for countless education systems across the world. Being able to set the analytical capabilities of Edurio to align with the information needs of an organisation became our own “game changer”. We wanted this to work for Western Cape, but also for every other education system working to close the achievement gap and bring equal opportunities to every student.
Therefore, we focused on the infrastructure — making a system that could handle large amounts of contextual data and use it to do deep analysis on even larger sets of data, while also being flexible enough to adapt depending on the organisation.
To share result data among people at different levels of the education system, Western Cape Government and the delivery unit, allowing each to filter and interpret data according to their role.
As Penny described in her last post:
…the survey tools and platforms we use must provide a feedback loop, providing relevant information and analysis to the various levels engaged in processing of data, from the school principal, to district officials to the provincial authorities… The survey tool must be easily accessible to key stakeholders and data partners on various technology platforms, and provide different views on the data depending on the user’s role.
Once again, this was an important lesson in the needs of the system infrastructure. Data being stuck in silos is a common complaint in education, but you can’t just throw all the data at everyone in the same format.
We had always envisioned a Multi-Tiered System that would give more people access to information that could really shape their day-to-day work, so it was a welcomed push in the right direction and we’re excited to see it in action this year.
Thanks to a lot of behind-the-scenes work over the last year by our development team, we were able to shake up the account structure this summer to allow for different levels of access, setting permissions for each individual account that is attached to an umbrella organisation.
What does that mean for Western Cape? Well, the provincial Education Department will be administering surveys to all the districts and schools that it serves. They will be able to view results as a whole or “zoom-in” to one group of schools, one individual school, or even one individual classroom.
That same data would also be useful to a school principal, although maybe in a different way or for a different reason. With this new structure, the school principal has immediate access as well, but only to that one school.
To monitor changes in perception and other indicators of progress over time to continuously guide implementation of the Game Changers.
When rolling out a big change, it is important to understand stakeholder perceptions at every stage. Western Cape is well-prepared to take a different approach where needed depending on local context. Surveys being done this first year will gauge attitudes, perceptions and behaviours to help guide the first stages of implementation.
But what about moving forward? How will they know if the Game Changers are having a positive or negative impact and how to react to different situations?
We believe that the best use of Edurio will come from repeated surveying, allowing continuous monitoring of school quality, or in this case continuous monitoring of stakeholder feedback during a time of huge change.
Edurio now includes a Comparison Over Time feature that automatically tracks all changes in results when a survey is repeated.
To administer surveys in different languages.
South Africa is home to a diverse population of people and also languages. Especially in more rural areas, it is necessary to make surveys available in the local language. The Department, however, obviously needs to be able to view the aggregated response data in one place.
Multi-Language Surveys are now possible with no added effort when it comes time to analyse results. The same survey is accessed by all respondents and each can simply choose which language to take it in at the start.
Stay tuned for more progress from Western Cape + Edurio as all these technical features get put to the test this 2017–2018 academic year.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 SME programme for open and disruptive innovation under grant agreement №733984.
