BETT 2008
So one of my New Year's resolutions was to blog more. This is something that is remarkably hard to do being part of Services as much of what we do is for customers and so is bound by non-disclosure and IP agreements.
However, the project I've just finished isn't such a project. It was a proof of concept to show how high school educators might interact with their students data in the future. It was demonstrated at BETT 2008 earlier this month and garnered quite a bit of interest.
One of the things I wanted to do differently on this project, it being a POC, was to build something more than just smoke and mirrors. Something which used real data and wasn't that far a leap to imagine as a real product.
We chose WPF to develop the user interface in. Maybe a bit of a risk as 2/3rds of the development team had no WPF or Blend experience! But having had my first experiences with WPF back in the early days and having seen how much can be achieved with short timescale over and over again, I knew it was the right choice.
The first image shows the main screen. Here we are plotting the average grade of each student against their attendance with the students in the bottom left being those of most concern.
We can select those students using a stylus and bring them up for comparison with KPIs displayed and quick indicators of upward or downward change. There is also detail of the conversations that have happened between students and tutors and even add to that conversation.
At this point it is possible to drill further down into a student and look at their attainment and KPIs in more detail but also to look at risk factors and how a student is responding to any interventions on those risks.
Overall this project has opened my eyes to the ways in which schools are collecting and using data. Mostly schools are very data rich and very analysis/visualisation poor. Our hope is that projects like this one will help to minimise that divide.