#and analytics

Middle school students at AltSchool’s Fort Mason campus in San Francisco. Ramin Rahimian for Education Week

Cross-posted from the Digital Education blog

AltSchool isn’t the first ed-tech company to believe there’s a market for tools that improves communication between schools and parents.

But three things make the approach of this Bay Area startup, featured in Education Week’s new special report on fresh approaches to personalized learning, unusual:

The company’s in-development app, dubbed Stream, is just one component of a “full stack” of K-12 software tools under development;

AltSchool has its own network of private schools that serve as research-and-development labs for those tools;

And AltSchool’s commitment to big data means that Stream (and its other tools) is evolving in almost-real time, in direct response to the wishes and experiences of the teachers and parents who are actually using it.

“Most school systems are on a one- to two-year change management timeline,” said Rajiv Bhatia, AltSchool’s vice president of product.

“Here, we’re about continuous loops,” said Bhatia, who formerly held a similar post at mobile-game company Zynga. “We want classrooms using our technology products, and we have an engineering and product team that can react to their feedback quickly.”

Last month, I had the chance to see that process in action during my visit to AltSchool headquarters in San Francisco. The classroom cameras and microphones and sensors in the company’s campuses obviously draw a lot of attention, as does AltSchool’s huge recent success in securing millions in venture capital from Mark Zuckerberg and others. The privacy worries that the company&mdata;and the rise of big data more broadly—are prompting are also a big part of the conversation.

Read more about AltSchool in the recent Ed Week story, “The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education.” 

But for me, one of the most eye-opening experiences was sitting in on a product meeting for Stream, the company’s in-development parent communication app.

Having suffered through countless soul-killingly unproductive meetings during my years in academia, nonprofits, schools, and newsrooms, it was a revelation to see just how minutely and deeply everything at AltSchool is driven by data.

Stream’s premise is pretty straightforward: it’s a mobile app intended to facilitate personalized communication between schools and parents. From the schools, that means updates, alerts, and news, as well as a window into class projects, teacher reflections on each student’s progress, and individual student highlights. The app was released within the AltSchool universe earlier this fall. At the time of my visit, hundreds of AltSchool parents and teachers had been using the tool for several weeks.

During the product meeting, company leaders responsible for developing the app, as well as engineers, experts in parent outreach and user experience, and others sat down for a comprehensive review of how Stream was being used, what could be improved, and how the impact of any changes could be tracked.

That’s where big data and analytics come in. At AltSchool, there are metrics for everything. The granularity of the data was (to me at least) pretty stunning. And most importantly, there was plenty of evidence of a top-to-bottom commitment to making sure that information was used to actually drive decisions.

Among the data the product team looked at when reviewing Stream:

Parent usage, measured by total views per week, as well as the percentage of parents who viewed the app at least once each week;

Teacher adoption, measured by the frequency with which each teacher in each classroom posted updates to the app;

Personalization, measured by the number of student-specific posts and “highlights” per student shared over the previous two weeks;

Quality, measured by a review of the content of every single post that every teacher had made to Stream;

Parent and teacher satisfaction, measured through constant AltSchool surveys of each group.

All those disparate information flows were also looked at in relation to each other.

Lots of numbers were presented during the meeting. Some of the broader insights had to do with the company’s progress towards its core goals, including a) providing parents with greater visibility into what their children are doing and learning each day, and b) saving teachers time.

Based on the data, for example, it seemed that AltSchool parents who expressed the least satisfaction with AltSchool’s “academic transparency” had children in classrooms where teachers made the fewest high-quality Stream posts. At the same time, though, busy teachers in many classrooms were struggling to create more (and more-personalized) messages, in part because they couldn’t post to the app directly via their phones.

Interesting enough, if not entirely surprising.

But what did catch my eye as different—and what AltSchool is staking its future on—is its ability to quickly and continuously turn those types of insights into better products.

During the Stream product meeting, for example, AltSchool developers committed to creating in-app templates that would encourage teachers to create the types of posts that had been found to be most satisfying to parents. They also committed to tweaking Stream to accept mobile updates. For good measure, they also committed to adding in Instagram-type commenting and “like” features for parents. Because AltSchool has a product engineering and design team of more than 50 people, all the changes were to be made and rolled out to schools within a matter of days or weeks.

The impact of those changes would also be tracked: By the following month, AltSchool aimed to have 50 percent of its teachers making mobile posts each week, to reduce teachers’ average time spent posting individual student highlights by 10 percent, and to get 60 percent of parents to have liked or commented upon a Stream post at least once.

That kind of analytics-driven process speaks to a very different philosophy than what I’ve often observed in many other educational systems, where schools’ inability to incorporate or effectively use new technologies most often seems to lead to either hand-wringing, more trainings for teachers, or, most often, indifference.

“When one of our tools falls short in some aspect, that’s a failing of the tool, not a failing of the person using that tool,” said AltSchool CEO Max Ventilla. “If stuff is junk, then it’s not surprising that [teachers] don’t use it.”

As I explain in this week’s special report, the K-12 sector is still wrestling with whether and how to embrace analytics, especially when it comes to increased data collection inside the classroom. Privacy worries, bureaucratic hurdles within school districts, and often-stunning hubris on the part of ed-tech companies themselves have all proven to be significant hurdles time and again.

Special Report: Extending the Digital Reach: Schools Push Personalized Learning to New Heights 

Perhaps AltSchool will trip over these, too. Some privacy advocates are already voicing concern over the company’s approach inside its schools. Ventilla—who believes the process laid out above will over time yield transformational technologies that teachers and parents won’t be able to live without—is certainly not lacking in ambition or confidence.

But given the way analytics is already transforming industries such as finance, consumer technology, retail sales, and professional sports, it’s hard to envision a future in which the basic principle of gathering ever-more data and analyzing that information in the hopes of spurring continuous improvement doesn’t become a big part of education, too.

Photo: Middle school students in teacher Christie Seyfert’s class watch their daily CNN Student News video at the AltSchool Fort Mason campus in San Francisco. The school is one of six private schools run by AltSchool, a technology startup with aggressive plans to use student data to personalize learning.—Ramin Rahimian for Education Week

See also:

Analytics in K-12: Big Data or Big Brother?

Digital Tools Evolving to Track Students’ Emotions, Mindsets

 for the latest news on ed-tech policies, practices, and trends.

Originally posted on http://ift.tt/1mUW3vU

The post Exploring the Future of Big Data, and Analytics, With AltSchool – Education Week (subscription) (blog) appeared first on Big Data News Magazine.

Middle school students at AltSchool’s Fort Mason campus in San Francisco. Ramin Rahimian for Education Week

Cross-posted from the Digital Education blog

AltSchool isn’t the first ed-tech company to believe there’s a market for tools that improves communication between schools and parents.

But three things make the approach of this Bay Area startup, featured in Education Week’s new special report on fresh approaches to personalized learning, unusual:

The company’s in-development app, dubbed Stream, is just one component of a “full stack” of K-12 software tools under development;

AltSchool has its own network of private schools that serve as research-and-development labs for those tools;

And AltSchool’s commitment to big data means that Stream (and its other tools) is evolving in almost-real time, in direct response to the wishes and experiences of the teachers and parents who are actually using it.

“Most school systems are on a one- to two-year change management timeline,” said Rajiv Bhatia, AltSchool’s vice president of product.

“Here, we’re about continuous loops,” said Bhatia, who formerly held a similar post at mobile-game company Zynga. “We want classrooms using our technology products, and we have an engineering and product team that can react to their feedback quickly.”

Last month, I had the chance to see that process in action during my visit to AltSchool headquarters in San Francisco. The classroom cameras and microphones and sensors in the company’s campuses obviously draw a lot of attention, as does AltSchool’s huge recent success in securing millions in venture capital from Mark Zuckerberg and others. The privacy worries that the company&mdata;and the rise of big data more broadly—are prompting are also a big part of the conversation.

Read more about AltSchool in the recent Ed Week story, “The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education.” 

But for me, one of the most eye-opening experiences was sitting in on a product meeting for Stream, the company’s in-development parent communication app.

Having suffered through countless soul-killingly unproductive meetings during my years in academia, nonprofits, schools, and newsrooms, it was a revelation to see just how minutely and deeply everything at AltSchool is driven by data.

Stream’s premise is pretty straightforward: it’s a mobile app intended to facilitate personalized communication between schools and parents. From the schools, that means updates, alerts, and news, as well as a window into class projects, teacher reflections on each student’s progress, and individual student highlights. The app was released within the AltSchool universe earlier this fall. At the time of my visit, hundreds of AltSchool parents and teachers had been using the tool for several weeks.

During the product meeting, company leaders responsible for developing the app, as well as engineers, experts in parent outreach and user experience, and others sat down for a comprehensive review of how Stream was being used, what could be improved, and how the impact of any changes could be tracked.

That’s where big data and analytics come in. At AltSchool, there are metrics for everything. The granularity of the data was (to me at least) pretty stunning. And most importantly, there was plenty of evidence of a top-to-bottom commitment to making sure that information was used to actually drive decisions.

Among the data the product team looked at when reviewing Stream:

Parent usage, measured by total views per week, as well as the percentage of parents who viewed the app at least once each week;

Teacher adoption, measured by the frequency with which each teacher in each classroom posted updates to the app;

Personalization, measured by the number of student-specific posts and “highlights” per student shared over the previous two weeks;

Quality, measured by a review of the content of every single post that every teacher had made to Stream;

Parent and teacher satisfaction, measured through constant AltSchool surveys of each group.

All those disparate information flows were also looked at in relation to each other.

Lots of numbers were presented during the meeting. Some of the broader insights had to do with the company’s progress towards its core goals, including a) providing parents with greater visibility into what their children are doing and learning each day, and b) saving teachers time.

Based on the data, for example, it seemed that AltSchool parents who expressed the least satisfaction with AltSchool’s “academic transparency” had children in classrooms where teachers made the fewest high-quality Stream posts. At the same time, though, busy teachers in many classrooms were struggling to create more (and more-personalized) messages, in part because they couldn’t post to the app directly via their phones.

Interesting enough, if not entirely surprising.

But what did catch my eye as different—and what AltSchool is staking its future on—is its ability to quickly and continuously turn those types of insights into better products.

During the Stream product meeting, for example, AltSchool developers committed to creating in-app templates that would encourage teachers to create the types of posts that had been found to be most satisfying to parents. They also committed to tweaking Stream to accept mobile updates. For good measure, they also committed to adding in Instagram-type commenting and “like” features for parents. Because AltSchool has a product engineering and design team of more than 50 people, all the changes were to be made and rolled out to schools within a matter of days or weeks.

The impact of those changes would also be tracked: By the following month, AltSchool aimed to have 50 percent of its teachers making mobile posts each week, to reduce teachers’ average time spent posting individual student highlights by 10 percent, and to get 60 percent of parents to have liked or commented upon a Stream post at least once.

That kind of analytics-driven process speaks to a very different philosophy than what I’ve often observed in many other educational systems, where schools’ inability to incorporate or effectively use new technologies most often seems to lead to either hand-wringing, more trainings for teachers, or, most often, indifference.

“When one of our tools falls short in some aspect, that’s a failing of the tool, not a failing of the person using that tool,” said AltSchool CEO Max Ventilla. “If stuff is junk, then it’s not surprising that [teachers] don’t use it.”

As I explain in this week’s special report, the K-12 sector is still wrestling with whether and how to embrace analytics, especially when it comes to increased data collection inside the classroom. Privacy worries, bureaucratic hurdles within school districts, and often-stunning hubris on the part of ed-tech companies themselves have all proven to be significant hurdles time and again.

Special Report: Extending the Digital Reach: Schools Push Personalized Learning to New Heights 

Perhaps AltSchool will trip over these, too. Some privacy advocates are already voicing concern over the company’s approach inside its schools. Ventilla—who believes the process laid out above will over time yield transformational technologies that teachers and parents won’t be able to live without—is certainly not lacking in ambition or confidence.

But given the way analytics is already transforming industries such as finance, consumer technology, retail sales, and professional sports, it’s hard to envision a future in which the basic principle of gathering ever-more data and analyzing that information in the hopes of spurring continuous improvement doesn’t become a big part of education, too.

Photo: Middle school students in teacher Christie Seyfert’s class watch their daily CNN Student News video at the AltSchool Fort Mason campus in San Francisco. The school is one of six private schools run by AltSchool, a technology startup with aggressive plans to use student data to personalize learning.—Ramin Rahimian for Education Week

See also:

Analytics in K-12: Big Data or Big Brother?

Digital Tools Evolving to Track Students’ Emotions, Mindsets

 for the latest news on ed-tech policies, practices, and trends.

Originally posted on http://ift.tt/1Q4zOQ7

The post Exploring the Future of Big Data, and Analytics, With AltSchool – Education Week (subscription) (blog) appeared first on Big Data News Magazine.

Middle school students at AltSchool’s Fort Mason campus in San Francisco. Ramin Rahimian for Education Week

Cross-posted from the Digital Education blog

AltSchool isn’t the first ed-tech company to believe there’s a market for tools that improves communication between schools and parents.

But three things make the approach of this Bay Area startup, featured in Education Week’s new special report on fresh approaches to personalized learning, unusual:

The company’s in-development app, dubbed Stream, is just one component of a “full stack” of K-12 software tools under development;

AltSchool has its own network of private schools that serve as research-and-development labs for those tools;

And AltSchool’s commitment to big data means that Stream (and its other tools) is evolving in almost-real time, in direct response to the wishes and experiences of the teachers and parents who are actually using it.

“Most school systems are on a one- to two-year change management timeline,” said Rajiv Bhatia, AltSchool’s vice president of product.

“Here, we’re about continuous loops,” said Bhatia, who formerly held a similar post at mobile-game company Zynga. “We want classrooms using our technology products, and we have an engineering and product team that can react to their feedback quickly.”

Last month, I had the chance to see that process in action during my visit to AltSchool headquarters in San Francisco. The classroom cameras and microphones and sensors in the company’s campuses obviously draw a lot of attention, as does AltSchool’s huge recent success in securing millions in venture capital from Mark Zuckerberg and others. The privacy worries that the company&mdata;and the rise of big data more broadly—are prompting are also a big part of the conversation.

Read more about AltSchool in the recent Ed Week story, “The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education.” 

But for me, one of the most eye-opening experiences was sitting in on a product meeting for Stream, the company’s in-development parent communication app.

Having suffered through countless soul-killingly unproductive meetings during my years in academia, nonprofits, schools, and newsrooms, it was a revelation to see just how minutely and deeply everything at AltSchool is driven by data.

Stream’s premise is pretty straightforward: it’s a mobile app intended to facilitate personalized communication between schools and parents. From the schools, that means updates, alerts, and news, as well as a window into class projects, teacher reflections on each student’s progress, and individual student highlights. The app was released within the AltSchool universe earlier this fall. At the time of my visit, hundreds of AltSchool parents and teachers had been using the tool for several weeks.

During the product meeting, company leaders responsible for developing the app, as well as engineers, experts in parent outreach and user experience, and others sat down for a comprehensive review of how Stream was being used, what could be improved, and how the impact of any changes could be tracked.

That’s where big data and analytics come in. At AltSchool, there are metrics for everything. The granularity of the data was (to me at least) pretty stunning. And most importantly, there was plenty of evidence of a top-to-bottom commitment to making sure that information was used to actually drive decisions.

Among the data the product team looked at when reviewing Stream:

Parent usage, measured by total views per week, as well as the percentage of parents who viewed the app at least once each week;

Teacher adoption, measured by the frequency with which each teacher in each classroom posted updates to the app;

Personalization, measured by the number of student-specific posts and “highlights” per student shared over the previous two weeks;

Quality, measured by a review of the content of every single post that every teacher had made to Stream;

Parent and teacher satisfaction, measured through constant AltSchool surveys of each group.

All those disparate information flows were also looked at in relation to each other.

Lots of numbers were presented during the meeting. Some of the broader insights had to do with the company’s progress towards its core goals, including a) providing parents with greater visibility into what their children are doing and learning each day, and b) saving teachers time.

Based on the data, for example, it seemed that AltSchool parents who expressed the least satisfaction with AltSchool’s “academic transparency” had children in classrooms where teachers made the fewest high-quality Stream posts. At the same time, though, busy teachers in many classrooms were struggling to create more (and more-personalized) messages, in part because they couldn’t post to the app directly via their phones.

Interesting enough, if not entirely surprising.

But what did catch my eye as different—and what AltSchool is staking its future on—is its ability to quickly and continuously turn those types of insights into better products.

During the Stream product meeting, for example, AltSchool developers committed to creating in-app templates that would encourage teachers to create the types of posts that had been found to be most satisfying to parents. They also committed to tweaking Stream to accept mobile updates. For good measure, they also committed to adding in Instagram-type commenting and “like” features for parents. Because AltSchool has a product engineering and design team of more than 50 people, all the changes were to be made and rolled out to schools within a matter of days or weeks.

The impact of those changes would also be tracked: By the following month, AltSchool aimed to have 50 percent of its teachers making mobile posts each week, to reduce teachers’ average time spent posting individual student highlights by 10 percent, and to get 60 percent of parents to have liked or commented upon a Stream post at least once.

That kind of analytics-driven process speaks to a very different philosophy than what I’ve often observed in many other educational systems, where schools’ inability to incorporate or effectively use new technologies most often seems to lead to either hand-wringing, more trainings for teachers, or, most often, indifference.

“When one of our tools falls short in some aspect, that’s a failing of the tool, not a failing of the person using that tool,” said AltSchool CEO Max Ventilla. “If stuff is junk, then it’s not surprising that [teachers] don’t use it.”

As I explain in this week’s special report, the K-12 sector is still wrestling with whether and how to embrace analytics, especially when it comes to increased data collection inside the classroom. Privacy worries, bureaucratic hurdles within school districts, and often-stunning hubris on the part of ed-tech companies themselves have all proven to be significant hurdles time and again.

Special Report: Extending the Digital Reach: Schools Push Personalized Learning to New Heights 

Perhaps AltSchool will trip over these, too. Some privacy advocates are already voicing concern over the company’s approach inside its schools. Ventilla—who believes the process laid out above will over time yield transformational technologies that teachers and parents won’t be able to live without—is certainly not lacking in ambition or confidence.

But given the way analytics is already transforming industries such as finance, consumer technology, retail sales, and professional sports, it’s hard to envision a future in which the basic principle of gathering ever-more data and analyzing that information in the hopes of spurring continuous improvement doesn’t become a big part of education, too.

Photo: Middle school students in teacher Christie Seyfert’s class watch their daily CNN Student News video at the AltSchool Fort Mason campus in San Francisco. The school is one of six private schools run by AltSchool, a technology startup with aggressive plans to use student data to personalize learning.—Ramin Rahimian for Education Week

See also:

Analytics in K-12: Big Data or Big Brother?

Digital Tools Evolving to Track Students’ Emotions, Mindsets

 for the latest news on ed-tech policies, practices, and trends.

Originally posted on http://ift.tt/1ZjY8xP

The post Exploring the Future of Big Data, and Analytics, With AltSchool – Education Week (subscription) (blog) appeared first on Big Data News Magazine.

Product Management 101 for Data and Analytics

This deck was from the talk at InfoVision summit where the speaker walks through 10 tips for creating effective data and analytics products.

NASSCOM Big Data and Analytics Summit 2014 – The Industrialization of Analytics, Michael Barnes, FORRESTER

Presentation by Michael Barnes – Vice President, Research Director, FORRESTER at NASSCOM Big Data and Analytics Summit 2014. …

Rethinking the Risk Business: Data and Analytics in the Insurance Industry

Featuring highlights of the State Street 2013 Data and Analytics Survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit

New Post has been published on http://www.mouseworldnow.com/global-news/global-businesses-to-see-the-rise-of-agile-and-flexible-workplaces-zinnov.html

Global Businesses to see the rise of agile and flexible workplaces: Zinnov

Bangalore, May 14, 2014:  Zinnov, a leading Globalization Advisory and Market Expansion firm, today released findings of a study – R&D for Enterprises: Leveraging Megatrends, revealing key aspects that will drive businesses globally through the next few years. Focusing on the impact of disruptive concepts such as consumerization of IT, mobility, cloud, big data, and analytics, the study highlights an urgent need for the companies to challenge traditional business models and embrace agile and flexible workplace environments.

Today, consumerization of IT and mobility are not limited to the software industry, but are seeing increased penetration across industry segments such as healthcare, aerospace, and retail. It has therefore, become imperative for companies to re-define their turnaround time, design innovative solutions and adopt collaborative business models. As results of these changes in the underlying structure and functioning of organizations, Zinnov identified the following Megatrends that are expected to drive markets around the world.

Mobility and IT Consumerization compels companies to focus on flexibility The rapid growth of smart phones and BYOD practice has had a profound impact on how enterprises consume and invest on technology. However, the transition to mobility comes with the following key challenges, including a rise in the cost of product development, uncontrollable inflow of consumer data and concerns on data privacy and security.

  Cloud technology drives large companies to re-define their turnaround time 

Cloud adoption has increased tremendously not only amongst small and medium businesses, but also large enterprises aiming at optimizing costs. With the turn-around time on projects reducing drastically, innovative solutions have become the need of the hour across businesses

Leveraging data to understand consumer needs becomes imperative Further to adoption across consumer facing companies, several enterprise business-to-business companies are today leveraging benefits of Big Data and Analytics. With cloud and mobile data readily available for quick analyses, in-depth studies on customer behavior and preferences are losing significance.

Mushrooming startups across the globe diminish the relevance of geography  Startups, which are breeding grounds for innovation, are posing stiff competition to large players. Convergence of trends has resulted in a whole new set of possibility for digitally native startups disrupting long established businesses.

‘Acqui-hiring’ emerges as a global phenomenon

Acqui-hiring, the practice of acquiring a company for its talent rather than product is gaining popularity among large companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Apple, Twitter and Zynga. These acquisitions help large players accelerate their additional capabilities and own versatile offering portfolios. Acqui-hiring is expected to become a global phenomenon for companies focusing on expanding their talent pool with rich digital migrant companies following suit.

Restructuring internal IT, helps adapt to innovative disruption

Large and mature firms are waking up to the change and re-organizing themselves internally, diverging into systems of record (back-office workflow) and systems of engagement (customer facing workflow). Today, enterprises are shifting to Systems of Engagement, which prioritizes usability and design to deliver to roadmaps rather than well-structured requirements. The impact of this re-organization has been more in industries such as B2C – Retail, Hospitality, Travel, Healthcare and Retail banking.