Announcing Live Attendance!
At LearnSprout, we’re committed to cultivating a vibrant ecosystem of education applications. Opening up new datasets that were previously locked away deep inside student information systems (SISs) is core to our mission. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’re making current and historical attendance data available to our developers!
Historically, most of the information passed between SISs and other applications was limited to current roster data. The utility in that data is limited as doesn’t go beyond account provisioning and basic demographic analysis. The vast majority of the most valuable student data is still locked away inside the SISs. We believe the rich data stored inside an SIS could be better leveraged in new and useful ways. What if a school wants to transfer richer data sets to power other applications? Sadly it simply doesn’t happen because the deployment friction is too high. In an age where we can plug our social data from sources like Facebook to power third-party applications, it’s a shame the same can’t be done with education data!
“Your son has been absent nine times…”
Even when a school works up the courage to bridge the gap, they are forced to resort to either manual data re-entries or transferring CSVs across e-mail or FTP. This leads to transcription errors, security vulnerabilities, and stale data. It’s a very time consuming and labor intensive process.
Now, developers have the ability to pull live attendance data directly from the source! Data by itself is useless, but if we had a way to analyze and compare it against other related data, we could begin to tackle some long-standing questions that have previously been very difficult to answer:
- Can at-risk students be identified by using live attendance data?
- Does the distance from a school affect attendance rates?
- Does socioeconomic status affect attendance rates?
- What days are students most likely to skip school?
- Which students have missed the most school days?
- Do attendance rates vary significantly by teacher or by school?
- Does attendance affect grades?
The possibilities for analytics get even more interesting when coupled with other applications:
- Do badges and achievements awarded in a behavior management system affect attendance?
- Can classroom attendance rates be correlated to teacher evaluations that are tracked in performance management platforms and other professional development (PD) tools?
- Does software that manages individual learning plans (ILPs) have any effect on attendance?
- Can attendance and grades from 3rd party grade books that are not part of an SIS be analyzed to see if they’re correlated?
The possibilities are endless. You can check out the documentation and try out the new methods on our interactive console. If you have some cool ideas on how to integrate LearnSprout with your software, or if you’ve got a killer idea for the next big thing in edtech that can harness the power of live data, let us know!
- Joe
