Can we personalize education?

Now more than ever, the old African saying “It takes a village to raise a child” applies to educating our children, as parents, teachers and administrators must collaborate and work in a concerted effort. Clearly every student is different. Educators still face challenges to offer a personalized education. With an education longitudinal data system as the foundation, policy makers, district administrators, principals, teachers and parents can now work together with a focused visibility into insightful data. These insights on data, such as attendance, behavior and course performance, can make education more personalized.

Under many circumstances, these roles in a student’s education would work in silos, each with a different set of information. But visibility into a student’s progress for the entire village, all those with a direct interest in the child’s education, is true empowerment and is paramount to educational success. eScholar myTrack offers that visibility to allow for a more personalized education.

In a recent successful eScholar myTrack project implementation, I had the pleasure to work closely with the Arlington Independent School District in Arlington Texas. In this project, the parallel was clear between the educators who break down the silos with such a tool and the collaboration of the project team implementing the education data system. Multiple internal and external groups all collaborated contributing to the common goal. Our client and professional services teams worked closely with the myTrack application development and QA teams in loading and validating assessment data. The product design team served as custodians of the user experience. The school district’s technology team and the accountability group worked hand in hand to assure the standards and performance levels were validated and that assessment data displayed correctly. Our eScholar U team delivered training for hundreds of users over the last few weeks.

It was a group effort from the entire ‘village’ that led to this successful launch and we are excited to see how the Arlington Independent School District continues its implementation. But the collaboration doesn’t stop there. As we strive for iterative improvements, eScholar seeks regular feedback from clients and stakeholders, including parents and students, to improve on the system and processes to deliver top quality tools for educators.