Schoolytics: Democratizing data science for teachers, parents, and students with BigQuery

With the rapid influx of new technologies that have entered classrooms in recent years, many schools have the opportunity to leverage insights from data generated through student engagement with learning management systems (LMS) and applications to improve student outcomes. This can be particularly challenging for schools because they often face limitations when it comes to managing everyday IT demands, without even considering the need to better understand the wealth of data generated daily about student performance.

Schoolytics, an EdTech company, created a student data platform that simultaneously reduces the stress of information management in schools while unlocking analytics for all types of educational users.

"We started off by spending time with a few schools in San Francisco to get a feel for how they used data and their goals in capturing and analyzing the information," says Aaron Wertman, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Schoolytics. "Once you start to look at data beyond simple attendance records, things get interesting. With Schoolytics, we set out to help schools solve a critical challenge of ranking, connecting, and leveraging data from a wide variety of learning and administrative systems."

Schoolytics seeks to make data science more accessible to educators by leveraging cloud solutions that create a more cost-effective, current, and centralized data infrastructure that many schools lack. The company chose to work with Google Cloud, while partnering with Google for Education to improve service accessibility due to the increasing ubiquity of Chromebooks and Google Classroom in schools.

Breaking down data silos, increasing data value

Given the sudden ubiquity of digital solutions in the classroom, many schools run into issues capturing and managing the data they need on each student across several systems.

"There’s a common problem shared by teachers, administrators, and parents alike: They have access to a lot of data, but it’s typically not the data they need," says Courtney Monk, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Schoolytics. "Many of the learning management platforms schools use rely on operational data but are not at all set up as analytical tools. For this and many other reasons, it’s very hard to aggregate student data from multiple systems."

Schoolytics wants to help schools dig out insights from poorly managed data and help them build the infrastructure for dynamic analysis of performance metrics at both the individual student and district levels. To accomplish this goal, Schoolytics focuses on unifying data from several sources, including a school’s or district’s LMS that tracks assignments and grades, the student information system that covers demographic and attendance information, as well as any other tools the district might have in place for more ad hoc learning or formative assessment.

The company also wants to make data science useful to virtually every education stakeholder, including administrators, teachers, parents, and the students themselves—to give them more control over their own education.

Schoolytics adopted BigQuery to maximize the accessibility of data and scale up its services to serve more schools. "BigQuery solves a lot of problems for us. We are able to easily build out a BigQuery data warehouse for each school we serve and provide a scalable, centralized platform for data management and analytics," says Courtney. "BigQuery also gives us the security and interoperability to safely aggregate student information without cutting schools off from all underlying data."

Schoolytics runs its application on Google App Engine, while managing the bulk of its backend architecture on Google Cloud data solutions including Cloud Composer, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub, with BigQuery at the center. The company also uses Cloud Spanner as its relational database.

Google Cloud provides the scalable infrastructure Schoolytics needs to run a lean, startup business with 10 employees while serving 50 school district customers and 500,000 students across its free and paid offerings. To date, the team has created more than 1 billion data points on student records without sacrificing efficiency or security.

"Google Cloud enables us to create an incredibly powerful data solution for schools that provides teachers with timely, easily accessed views of the data points that matter most for aiding student success," says Aaron. "We also love how easy it is to deploy different types of tools and services on Google Cloud."

More secure data solutions for all schools

Schoolytics offers a paid and free version of its service to ensure availability to all teachers and schools who want to use it. The free version, used by about 13,000 teachers, is a streamlined dashboard that integrates directly with Google Classroom to allow first-time analytics users to get a feel for using the technology.

"Dealing with data can intimidate a lot of people. We’ve used our integration with Google Classroom to provide a more organic, straightforward experience for teachers," says Aaron. "Equally beneficial is the built-in auto scaling capabilities in App Engine, BigQuery, and other Google Cloud solutions, so we can provide fast onboarding experiences to the schools wanting to work with us."

Schoolytics also provides educators with the peace of mind that student data is highly protected, taking a security-by-design approach in its development. Native security and monitoring tools within Google Cloud streamline app development for the Schoolytics team, enabling them to scale their services to global customers without sacrificing data protection.

Looking ahead, Schoolytics plans to incorporate more machine learning tools to further accelerate actionable insights for teachers, providing granular information in real-time to support improved learning experiences and outcomes. As a Google EdTech partner that continually experiments with Google Cloud solutions such as BigQuery, Schoolytics will use ML to unlock the power of data for more schools.

"Teachers work hard, and we are trying to make their work easier by providing straightforward and readily available, yet powerful, analytics tools," says Courtney. "We will continue to work with Google Cloud and Google for Education to ensure that all schools, regardless of technology skills, can improve student performance and educational experiences with the help of data-informed strategies."