BustED Pencils Podcast, Class in Session- Otus: Giving Data a Good Name, with Chris Hull

By: Otus Team

Every teacher has sat through some version of the same meeting: a stack of names left to cover and 10 minutes left on the clock. Otus co-founder and president Chris Hull remembers that meeting well, because it’s the exact moment that pushed him to start building Otus in the first place.

Chris recently joined Dr. Tim Sleker and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci on the BustED Pencils podcast, where they jumped from articulation meetings to Fitbits to a Harry Potter reference or two. Even with all the banter, one thread through the whole episode: data doesn’t help anyone if it disappears, and it only becomes useful if it’s given real context. The full convo is worth a listen, but here are three moments that stuck with us.

3 ideas worth bringing back to your district

The knowledge teachers build about a student shouldn’t vanish at the end of the year

Otus grew out of a very specific kind of meeting: the end-of-year articulation conversation, where outgoing and incoming teachers try to hand off everything they know about a hundred-plus students in a fraction of the time that would take.

“Articulation meetings happened during the last week of school. I was the seventh grade teacher, and I’d meet with the sixth grade team, run through the list of sixth graders, and then meet with the eighth grade team and run through their list. You had about seventy-five minutes to get through a hundred and fifty names. You're not focusing on a hundred and fifty, you're getting your high flyers, maybe a couple details here and there. And who's going to remember that information come next school year? You're just going to have these tidbits of notes.”

Chris Hull

Co-founder and President
,
Otus

That’s the gap Otus was built to close. Instead of a stack of notes that fades by fall, student context lives in a profile that carries forward, whether the student changes grades, changes buildings, or gets a brand new teacher who’s never met them before.

A number is only as valuable as the context around it

Districts have no shortage of data. Grades, formative checks, diagnostics, common assessments, it’s all there. The gap, however, is turning that pile of numbers into something a teacher can act on.

“I think a lot of times we collect data just to collect the information, but we're not actually using it. How do we make it useful, actionable? That's really what Otus helps you do. If you wear a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, that's keeping some really good information, and you're just wearing it, you’re just doing it. That's also what Otus does. Your classroom assessments are right next to your diagnostic assessments and everything else about a student, so you’re not just looking at a single data point. You're looking at a collection of information along with their actual work.”

Chris Hull

Co-founder and President
,
Otus

Nobody needs to be a data scientist to benefit from wearing a smart watch that quietly tracks their steps, sleep, and other health metrics. The goal for Otus is the same instinct applied to a classroom; information that’s already being collected, made visible enough to act on without adding another task to a teacher’s day.

Parents need their student’s story

Ask what parents get out of seeing this kind of data, and Chris’ answer has nothing to do with test scores.

“It's amazing to hear a family member say, ‘I could see within Otus that my third grader is learning to understand why a character's traits are motivating or changing their decision-making in a story.’ As a parent, they're not going to tell me that. They're not going to tell me they're working on that skill. So that insight means we're rowing in the same direction. And it's not just a number; it's the skill, it's the words.”

Chris Hull

Co-founder and President
,
Otus

That’s a small example with a big implication. When families can see what a student is working on, beyond how they scored, the conversation at home shifts from “how did you do” to something a lot more specific and a lot more useful. Get students, families, and teachers looking at the same picture, and engagement follows, especially when battling chronic absenteeism.