Over the years, our work at eScholar has focused on implementations with large school districts and state education agencies. As a result, we didn’t have a strong offering for any sized school districts. However, our team has made a lot of thoughtful updates on how our solutions can be implemented, and today, I’m so happy to announce our new offering, eScholar Advantage. With eScholar Advantage, we can provide a large-scale enterprise analytics solution to a district of any size.
eScholar Advantage is an enterprise analytics solution that enables districts to bring data together into a single integrated platform for in-depth analytics. It is an end-to-end solution, from data integration to hosting to visualization and analysis. The solution offering includes the following features and services:
- Data integration from your SIS or Ed-Fi ODS with the capacity to bring in data from any number of data sources
- The full star schema data model of the eScholar CDW, covering over 60 data domains
- Hosting and application management on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Out-of-the-box visualizations with Amazon Quicksight, one of the leading data visualization tools in the market
- Plus, the ability to create your dashboards in Quicksight and connect to any other standard visualization/reporting tool, including Power BI, Tableau, etc.
- Access to analytics for district administrators and principals, with teachers on the near-term roadmap.
Who is eScholar Advantage for?
eScholar Advantage is for any district that wants to conduct root cause analysis to better support their students. With eScholar Advantage, you’re not just looking at assessment results, but looking at data alongside that result, such as program, demographic, discipline, and more. Districts aren’t limited to assessment data. Districts can also use this to analyze data related to finance/budgeting, staff, National Student Clearinghouse, and more. Below is a list of all data domains available with eScholar Advantage.
What kind of questions can I answer with eScholar Advantage?
Question | Possible Data Domains & Elements* |
|---|---|
Which students are most at-risk of chronic absenteeism? | Attendance: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Course, Period Student: Name, Enrollment, Grade Student Demographics: Race, Ethnicity, Free/Reduced-price lunch status Program: General education, special education, ELL/non-ELL Student Education Barriers |
Has our restorative justice program had an impact on disciplinary actions? Are we seeing different outcomes than when we did not practice restorative justice? | Discipline: Incidents, infractions, type of involvement, disciplinary responses, time, parental involvement, location Student: Name, enrollment, grade Student Demographics: race, ethnicity, other attributes Survey: Social Emotional Learning Survey results |
How do digital resources access correlate with academic performance? | Student Digital Resources: Internet Access Status, Internet Access Type, Device type Assessments: Assessment facts and attributes, dates, results, achievement levels, etc. Student: Name, enrollment, grade |
Are we seeing academic progress in all students, in different population and program groups? | Student: Name, enrollment, grade Student Demographics: race, ethnicity, other attributes Program: General education, special education, ELL/non-ELL Assessments: Assessment facts and attributes, dates, results, achievement levels, etc. Course and Class Attributes: subjects, honors indicator, course type Student Credits and GPA: credits, grades, tracks of study, program |
Do our students feel socially and emotionally supported to achieve academic progress? | Student: Name, enrollment, grade Student Demographics: race, ethnicity, other attributes Assessments: Assessment facts and attributes, dates, results, achievement levels, etc. Survey: Social Emotional Learning results |
After graduating from high school, what kind of postsecondary pathways do our students take? How does postsecondary pathway correlate with high school pathway? | Student: Name, enrollment, grade Student Demographics: race, ethnicity, other attributes Cohort Groups: Graduation cohort, other cohorts National Student Clearing House: college enrollment, college type, major, degree, CIP code Career and Technical Education (CTE): CTE Cluster, CTE Concentrator, CTE Industry Credential Pathway: Pathway Title, type, CIP code |
eScholar Advantage dashboards helped answer some of these example questions, but some of these questions were answered with dashboards that our client users created. As part of the eScholar Advantage license, districts can create dashboards using Quicksight for their specific questions and use cases. If districts have a different preferred BI application, such as PowerBI or Tableau, those can also be connected to eScholar Advantage.
The Fast Track to Analytics
Years of delivering solutions and services to the education field have taught us that the heaviest lift for districts in getting started, with any data analytics, was/is the initial setup. Setting up servers, installing database software, installing the eScholar software, and mapping, extracting, transforming, and loading the data. With eScholar Advantage, districts let us do the heavy lifting. There’s no software to install, and no servers to set up. eScholar Advantage is hosted on AWS, one of the leading cloud hosting providers known for its high performance, reliability, scalability, and security. We will also rely on data integration APIs, including the Ed-Fi API. We understand not every source system will have an API, so we still offer many other options to load data into eScholar Advantage, including good ol’ flat files, e.g., the eScholar Templates. The heavy lifting of getting started with analytics isn’t totally alleviated, but we’ve figured out ways to make it less heavy and more efficient. With eScholar Advantage, we anticipate getting our districts up and running with their initial set of dashboards in weeks, not months.
Get Started with eScholar Advantage
If what I’ve laid out about eScholar Advantage is of curiosity to you, take a look at our demo here. It’s an actual demo of eScholar Advantage, not just a GIF. Clicking the button and submitting your contact info, you will receive an email where you can play around with the demo. We have an attendance dashboard embedded, so that you can play with some demo data and get a feel for how our dashboards function.
Procurement for eScholar Advantage is easy too, as we are members of the EdTech Purchasing Co-op.
If you like what you’ve read, like what you see in the personal demo, fill out the form below to schedule a conversation with us.
