Welcome to part 6 of “Winning With Mobile,” the last part of our blog series. So far, we’ve covered CourseKey’s main features, including Social, Assessments and Evaluations, eBooks, and Attendance. All of these features are beneficial to schools, but to get the most out of them, users must be able to understand the data and how it affects the students, staff members, and the institution as a whole. So today, we will delve into how CourseKey uses data visualization to make analyzing different data quick and easy. Having a clean and simple tool to examine data allows staff members to more efficiently complete their tasks, increasing schools operational efficiency, boosting student retention, and storing data and records in an organized way to easily prove compliance during audits and reaccreditation visits. Different data is relevant to different groups of people involved in a school, so CourseKey has unique interfaces for students, instructors, and administrators that present the data they care about.
Students & Instructors
Students can view their attendance records as well as their assessment and evaluation grades all within the app. Stored in the “Student Gradebook,” attendance and assessment data is presented in a transactional view, giving the student a complete overview of their records. Records that have been altered by instructors or staff have a blue dot next to them, signaling to the student that data has been changed. Because those records are updated in real-time, the student can reference them at any point to know where they currently stand and identify if they’re at risk of falling behind. This increased insight into their own progression allows students to hold themselves accountable.
Similarly to the students, instructors can view the entire student roster for their courses and can check grades and attendance records in an instant using their web application. The instructors can see a roster of students enrolled in their classes and are able to monitor attendance and assessment grades with limited clicks.
Registrars & Admins
Unlike students and instructors, registrars and administrators have access to live attendance dashboards, giving them an overview of all of the classes currently in session and the percentage of enrolled students that have checked in for the day. Attendance for each course is depicted by color-coded percentage rings and registrars can detect at a glance which classes have alarming attendance records and can click into the course for further investigation. Viewing attendance data in real-time allows registrars to determine which students are at-risk, enabling the appropriate parties to intervene before anyone slips through the cracks. This capability aids in reduced student drop rate and improved retention.
Included alongside the live attendance dashboards is a window titled “Absent Students Now.” This tool is especially helpful to admins and registrars because instead of having to go through each active course to check which students did not attend class for the day, registrars can reference the “Absent Students Now” window to see all of the current absent students in an ordered list. With this information, registrars can further investigate the absent students’ records to determine if action needs to be taken to alert the student of their at-risk status. Being presented with this data in real-time allows administrators and registrars to intervene with students much faster than traditional processes that take valuable time to update records. Through simple and comprehensive data visualization, registrars and administrators can complete their tasks much more efficiently.
Achieve Operational Greatness with Mobile
Having a simple way to review relevant data and detect abnormalities instantly empowers administrative staff to make quick, informed choices. Whether staff members are reviewing assessment grades or going over attendance records, the data is only helpful if users can easily decipher what it means. Being able to understand the numbers allows schools to take full advantage of CourseKey’s main features and utilize them to their full capacity.
Now that “Winning With Mobile” is coming to a close, we should reflect on the topics we’ve covered. We saw how CourseKey’s social feature helps establish a learning community where students thrive together within organizations that sometimes lack the community feel due to facilities and/or location. We learned how digital evaluations and assessments help keep students engaged in class and present grades in real-time, giving students and instructors a much more timely and accurate insight into student progression. We discovered the power of eBooks and how they facilitate the modern students’ study habits. We detailed how CourseKey’s digital attendance solution spares hours of manual data entry and grants administrative staff up-to-date attendance records, helping them identify any at risk students before problems arise. Finally, we observed how live dashboards present the data cleanly to users in a way that is simple and easy, allowing staff to intervene with students and/or instructors when they need to. All of these features combined assist schools in increasing their efficiency, compliance, and student retention. Even more impressive is the fact that all of these features originate from the students’ mobile devices that are brought to class with them everyday. Being able to leverage something that already exists in the classroom to increase efficiency, compliance, and retention is a simple implementation that introduces boundless benefits. Schools that have done so already have experienced many advantages in areas that they were struggling with before. That’s winning with mobile. Is your school next?
