I recently had a verbal and email dialog with a colleague on the transplanted Business Intelligence concept of Dashboards.\u00a0 Essentially, this concept revolves around how to keep leadership informed on key elements of organizational success so that strategic decisions can be made in a timely and efficient manner.\u00a0 In schools, the focus shifts more to keeping elected or perpetual board members informed of school “status” with regards to all of the metrics we typically use to describe finance, learning, and accomplishment of strategic initiatives.\u00a0 This email is my online brainstorm of the data side of how we change the face of school management and the measurement of stakeholder satisfaction.<\/p>\n
My thinking has been around translating the corporate model of dashboards (see Business Intelligence<\/a>) into something that might work for education.\u00a0 I\u2019ll explain a little bit to see if we are on the same page and then you can help me push the envelope.\u00a0 I\u2019m, of course, also thinking about this from the technical side.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have a specific engine yet, but the theoretical models are forming and my database people assure me that they have code ideas to back this up.Here\u2019s what I\u2019m dealing with relative to my board and why I\u2019m looking at this to answer their questions and keep them informed as we grow.Budget \u2013 I\u2019m trying to get my board to see the big picture on budgetary concerns, so I see models for broad brush looks at budget and expenditures.<\/p>\n Broad based totals in simple mathematics – I\u2019d also like to converge this with a timeline function so that historical data is available.\u00a0 E.g. \u2013 I see a drop down list to select a month and have expenditure bars grow or shrink according to the budget year.\u00a0 Thus, capital expenditures will likely show early expenditure vs. salary which is pretty even vs. supplies which will likely be somewhere in-between with a bit of frontloading.\u00a0 For each stage in the process, there would be trendlines that would then adjust based on the most recent data.\u00a0 This trend can also be based on encumbrances if your financial system supports this.\u00a0 For far reaching examples of data\/time analysis, you should look at http:\/\/www.gapminder.org\/world\/<\/a> data \u2013 Think of this example using admission data.\u00a0 Again, I\u2019d like to look at trend line data like the gapminder example.\u00a0 With current database information from our student records system, it shouldn\u2019t be difficult to develop a similar interface.\u00a0 This would show grade level and gender components with overlays for nationality and other factors \u2013 all generally available depending upon how you do your archive data.\u00a0 It looks like Google bought this engine from them.\u00a0 It’s called Trendalyzer.\u00a0 Also, look at www.swivel.com<\/a> for another example of live charts.<\/p>\n [New note:\u00a0 Power School <\/a>(Pearson) has a dashboard component for their school management software.\u00a0 Very nice widget oriented approach.\u00a0 According to sources it was just released recently as part of PS Premier 5.1.2 – (info<\/a>\u00a0& here<\/a>).]<\/p>\n Engagement data \u2013 based on scheduling components. I\u2019d like to show engagement data that identifies staff contact time with students.\u00a0 So for any moment of the day, you can see what percentage of staff are engaged in scheduled activities.\u00a0 This is an important one for my board as they have high expectations for this.\u00a0 Besides a time based method, there would also be totals and summary methodologies.\u00a0<\/p>\n Project data \u2013 this is a Gant style, but it shows summary positioning on action plans \u2013 this would be RSS style with percentage complete and upcoming milestones.\u00a0 These would update on daily or weekly basis and could be linked with any flavor of project management methods or just regularly updated static data.\u00a0 Milestones and statements of progress could be simple blog style posts.<\/p>\n Satisfaction data \u2013 student\/parent \u2013 We have been moving toward more online survey data collection recently and I have been considering that single event data collection seems inadequate to guage progress over time. Recently, I went through immigration at Shanghai airport and found that they had installed customer satisfaction data collection units at each passport processing counter.\u00a0 The unit flashes for individuals to offer their feedback to the officer in the form of smiley face options.\u00a0 You\u2019ve probably seen these.\u00a0 Although I\u2019m not interested in mounting these on the teacher\u2019s door (although that\u2019s an interesting thought), I have been conjecturing about more regular single or small \u201cdipstick\u201d survey opportunities on our parent website and via email polls.\u00a0 This process can be automated based on random selection at login or randomly sent emails so that data collection for randomly selected segments of the stakeholders is relatively constant and ongoing.\u00a0 Where the dashboard comes in is relative to real time updates of this data based on submitted results.\u00a0 A thermometer, if you will, of sentiment.\u00a0 The data and questions could be focused around various aspects of school operation.\u00a0 It could be grouped or sourced from all stakeholder groups.<\/p>\n Assessment data \u2013 this one is trickier, but could work based on compilation of assessments if a scale score can be derived, or if some other type of norm referencing is used.\u00a0 This could also be centered around criterion referenced tools.\u00a0 Summary data would show trends, again, over time.<\/p>\n I\u2019m still thinking about other metrics that can be gathered over time more or less automatically.\u00a0 We always seem to have a wealth of data, but we\u2019re never sure where to put it.<\/p>\n The work on the website components for this likely exist in a combination of open source projects (about 20 of them in current development on Sourceforge) and a variety of BI off the shelf packages.\u00a0<\/p>\n Here\u2019s one example of an open source option:<\/p>\n http:\/\/spagobi.eng.it\/ecm\/faces\/public\/guest\/home\/solutions\/spagobi<\/a><\/p>\n There are many others.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what I have.\u00a0 I\u2019m interested in this, but I\u2019m time crunched right now.\u00a0 Lot\u2019s happening here, but I do have some people to explore this further. I\u2019m looking for cost effective solutions (read \u2013 free) to turn the data into something usable.\u00a0 I\u2019m still forming my thoughts on this a bit and\u00a0continued dialog might help push me down a certain path.\u00a0 I could also see EARCOS playing into this for regional based data warehousing and cross organizational trend analysis.\u00a0 I am also trying to think of options for the Learning 2.008 <\/a>conference that might start a more productive dialog on this topic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently had a verbal and email dialog with a colleague on the transplanted Business Intelligence concept of Dashboards.\u00a0 Essentially, this concept revolves around how to keep leadership informed on key elements of organizational success so that strategic decisions can be made in a timely and efficient manner.\u00a0 In schools, the focus shifts more to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferencestraining","category-farside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimplicity.hopto.org\/techtied\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}