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The Learning Analytics Collaborative
Learning Analytics Created By Educators For Educators
Monthly Newsletter
June 2021
What Our Members Are Saying

Schools are busy places, so we really appreciate the support from the Learning Analytics Collaborative team. It is like having your own data scientist, programmer, and data interpreter on your staff just when you need them. We are most helped when we interact with people in similar roles at other schools.
Jay Priebe
Director of IT
NIST, Bangkok
Dear LAC Members,

Welcome to our June LAC Newsletter! We are almost at the end of this academic year, and I am sure everyone is looking forward to a well deserved break after a challenging year. Our team is ensuring all data uploads for the last batch of achievement data are updated on your sites. The LAC team will remain available for you throughout the summer. We have begun migrating schools to the new interface. We will be contacting schools as their site is ready for transition. 

Thank you to all who participated in our SEL Dashboard demo on the 15th May. We have received some valuable feedback. We will use this feedback to include further enhancements and have the dashboard ready for launch in the fall. We are also very happy to see the Class Placement engines being successfully deployed and used by multiple schools. 

We are always keen to promote best practices when it comes to Creating Cultures of Data Use at Schools. Thank you to all who joined our webinar with Veracross on 22nd May - “Developing a Data Culture: How UNIS Hanoi used Data Visualization to Improve Teaching and Learning” led by Megan Brazil and co-hosted by me. We had an amazing turn out with almost 50 participants! 

We are continuing our partnership with Veracross and we will be joining their virtual VC Connect conference from June 21-25, 2021. We will present three separate sessions, more about them and Megan’s session below!

The LAC Data Literacy Tier 1 workshops are now published on our LAC Learning Space! You can access them on demand along with the Navigators we have prepared for each Module.

Please remember that we have also launched our LAC Blog where you can read great articles about Learning Analytics and beyond! You can find more details below!

I am also delighted to welcome International School of Luxembourg and American International School Abuja to the LAC family! The schools have just joined us and are beginning their journey to implement the platform at their school.

All the best, stay safe!

Piotr Olczak
Director of Learning Analytics
Consilience Education Foundation
LAC & Veracross - Creating Cultures of Data Use
We are partnering with Veracross to present a series of webinars about building a culture of data use. The first session of the webinar series held on 22nd of May “Developing a Data Culture: How UNIS Hanoi used Data Visualization to Improve Teaching and Learning” turned out to be a great success! We had more than 50 participants and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The webinar was led by Megan Brazil, Elementary School Principal at UNIS-Hanoi and co-hosted by Piotr Olczak. We would like to congratulate and thank Megan for this amazing session! You can watch the recording and view the slide deck on our LAC Learning Space!

We will be joining Veracross’ virtual VC Connect conference held from June 21 to 25, 2021. We will present three separate sessions:

  • Session 1 - June 22, 2021 at 8:00-8:45 AM EST
"Harnessing Analytics to Better Understanding Learners" presented by Piotr Olczak. In this session we will take a close look at three international schools and their data literacy journeys with LAC. Discover their challenges, follow developments and investigate solutions they have applied in order to raise the data literacy levels, resolve data management issues, and apply learning analytics to transform the way in which they place students into classes.

  • Session 2 - June 23, 2021 at 2:30-3:00 AM EST 
“Essential Conditions for Building a Culture of Data Use” presented by Shabbi Luthra. Schools gather limitless information about their students and their skills, needs, and their growth/ progress. They hope this data can be used by their teachers to design interventions and learning engagements for their students. In order for teachers to use the data, it requires that schools build a culture of data use. This session will share the essential conditions for schools to build and develop a data-using and data-informed culture.

  • Session 3 - June 24, 2021 at 2:00-2:45 AM EST 
“Using Data to Empower Faculty and Staff to Better Understand Their Students" presented by Jay Priebe from NIST and co-hosted by Piotr Olczak. NIST collects data in thier SIS, Veracross since it is central and teachers are already used to entering data there. We then make specific queries in Veracross that allow us to export to the Learning Analytics Collaborative (LAC) platform shortly after grading periods are finished. Our final key is to make sure that LAC is accessible to all staff via numerous pathways. Integrating its use within Veracross is an important pathway.

Register for these and many more sessions on the VC Connect site!
LAC Blog
The latest entry in the LAC Blog is about a video posted on Edutopia on “Using Data to Support Teacher and Student Growth”. 


You can also read previous posts including:
  • LAC School Spotlight - International School of Beijing by Ruth Poulsen, Director of Curriculum and Assessment at International School of Beijing
  • “Wellbeing, Relationships and Teaching as a Caring Profession?” Very poignant article for the current conversations taking place on Wellbeing and its place in the school culture, especially among International Schools.
  • ‘Designing Best-Fit Classes with the Class Placement Engine’ by by Ben Hacking , Deputy Principal at the Vienna International School
  • ‘Data Journey: Discovering Learning Analytics at Zurich International School’ by Andrew Blair, Head of IT Services and Solutions at Zurich International School
  • ‘Making Student Data Part of the Conversation!’ A case study of how Humboldt Elementary, a school once on the verge of being labeled under-performing, turned to data to move the bar on student success.
  • ‘LAC School Spotlight - American School of Bucharest’ by Andrew Pontius, IB MYP Coordinator, and Fiona Moss, Secondary Vice Principal at American International School of Bucharest
  • ‘How International School of Phnom Penh uses data to inform decision-making within the Student Support Team’ by Jonathan Smedes, Director of Learning, Teaching, Innovation and Impact at International School of Phnom Penh
  • ‘Building and Leading a School Culture that Values Data Informed Dialogue to Improve Student Learning’ by Megan Brazil, Elementary School Principal, UNIS-Hanoi
Learning Data Audits
In order to effectively manage data assets and fully realize their potential, any school must first be aware of the location, condition and value of its data. Conducting an audit will provide this information, raising awareness of collection strengths, highlighting areas of improvement as well as potential data issues to improve overall strategy. An audit will highlight duplication of efforts and areas that require additional investment, allowing any school to optimize its resources. It will also highlight shortfalls in data creation and control practices, suggesting changes to minimize the potential risks. Broadly speaking, auditing school’s data assets yields the following benefits:
  • prioritization of resources which leads to efficiency savings
  • ability to manage risks associated with data loss and misuse
  • increasing the value of data assets through improved access and reuse
  • enabling effective and efficient learning analytics and data visualization for data-informed decision making

Full information can be found here

If you are interested in conducting such a Learning Data Audit at your school, please contact Piotr.
Engine of the Month - ACER ISA
This month we are showcasing one of the family of three engines developed to analyze ACER International Student Assessment (ISA) data.
ACER ISA Data Explorer visualizes key student level and question level metrics for all candidates across grade levels and strands for one testing period.
If you would like to find out more about these engines, you can watch the video about the ISA engine in the LAC Learning Space. If you would like to implement it in your school’s LAC site, please contact Piotr
Data Literacy - Building a Culture of Data Use

"As we wind down this unimaginable school year and look to the future, it will now be critical once again for all schools to look to MTSS as an organizational foundation for meeting student’s needs during the 2021-2022 school year. All students must "catch up;" specific groups of students more than others. To ensure all students can regain ground, we must urgently begin next year with a deep understanding of our student's current areas of academic performance, instruct with a robust core curriculum, provide and monitor data-driven interventions, strengthen attendance, and provide social-emotional support, or in other words, use MTSS as a guiding principle to organize the 2021-2022 school year."

This article from Branching Minds breaks down what MTSS is and what the organizing principle looks like for schools. LAC is always looking for ways to support schools with bringing MTSS data into LAC ecosystem and incorporating them with existing visualizations. For example, by bringing MTSS flags as legends into Student Data Explorer and allowing teachers to selected a specific Tier or a caseload and compare students' performance for both internal and external assessments in a form of interactive matrix.
Useful Links
Consilience is a non-profit, global education innovation company that supports institutions and educators to transform teaching and learning. We provide leadership training and professional development in the areas of Innovation Leadership, Technology Integration, Maker Learning, Online Learning and Learning Analytics. For more information about our work, please visit our website: www.consiliencelearning.org 
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