A parent asking how school is going is a simple question, but it can be surprisingly hard to answer. Otus co-founder and president Chris Hull calls a child “an unreliable narrator” on this front, and his path into data and analytics started from the same kind of problem. As a seventh-grade social studies teacher, he had plenty of information about his students and no easy way to use it.
Chris joined the Unlocking Value with Data Podcast, a show about how data turns into decisions and outcomes, to talk about what changes when everyone around a student works from the same information, and what generative AI could change next.
Describing the data is only the starting point
Describing what the data says is a strength of most schools and platforms. The payoff, however, only comes when everyone around a student works from the same information and the conversation moves from where a student stands to what to do about it. That’s where diagnostic analytics, which asks why, and predictive analytics, which looks ahead, come in.
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“Otus really brings all of these stakeholders together on one kind of plane or one platform so that we're all talking about the same things. So that way the data is shared and common amongst everybody. And we're then able to get past just the communication of where are we? We can really begin to diagnose what we should do next and diagnose where we should go.” |
Fewer platforms and fewer guesses justify the investment
Student data platforms like Otus bring a school’s separate (often disconnected) tools together in one place. Districts adopt them to simplify the monumental task of managing all student information and to see measurable results. With Otus, success shows up in time savings that educators report in surveys, student growth on formative assessments, intervention success rates, and teacher adoption and retention. In one Florida district, leaders curbed chronic absenteeism by using insights to target their interventions. The data guides the work; the district does it.
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"Instead of using five different platforms, they can now use one. Instead of guessing at what interventions are working, they can now make data-backed decisions." |
AI turns a report into a question
A question like “How are my fifth-grade IEP students who come in for lunch intervention doing compared to all fifth-grade students?” can be answered in a report that takes minutes to build. Generative AI turns it into a sentence typed in plain language, so the answer no longer depends on knowing how to build a report. Over the next few years, data is expected to move from reporting what happened to flagging student challenges as they arise and recommending targeted interventions.
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"I think data is no longer going to be a passive tool. I think it's going to have to be a proactive driver of student success." |