The Power of Data Aggregation for Student Success

Most online learning programs track student data. Whether it’s attendance, engagement, or assignment submissions, it’s important to know who is on track and who is falling behind. 

But looking at each of these metrics individually can only give you a piece of the puzzle. If you reach out to a learner after 3 missed classes, you might be too late in trying to get them back on track. 

Timing is key when it comes to student success, which is why it’s important to reach out as early as possible to students that might be struggling. 

But how can you know at the very first sign that a student might be struggling? Getting a holistic view of learner progress is key, and the best way to do that is by aggregating your student data. 

‍

What Student Data To Track

‍

Attendance:

• Live Session Attendance - How many students attended (and how many missed)?  ‍
• Live Session Join Times - At what time did students join the online session? ‍
• Live Session Leave Times - At what time did students leave the online session? ‍
• Attendance Duration - How long did students stay in the session? Use the join and leave times to calculate this metric.  

Check out 3 big picture insights you can learn from attendance data here. 

‍

Behavior:

• LMS Logins - How many times has the student logged in to your LMS?
• Time in LMS Platform - How long has a student stayed logged in to your LMS?
• Module Completion - How many modules have they worked their way through over a set period of time? 
• Assignment Submissions - How many assignments has the student submitted? How many are they missing? 

‍

Community Engagement:

• Community Posts - How many times has a student posted in your community tool in a given period of time (whether its Slack, Discord, or something else entirely)?
• Community Comments - How many times have they commented, since comments are equally indicative of engagement as posts? 
• Community Reactions - Emojis count too! While less telling than posts, how many times have students reacted to posts over a set period of time? 

Learn more about engagement tracking here. 

‍

How to Aggregate Your Student Data

Oftentimes, these different data points are tracked across a variety of different tools. How do you bring them all together to get a holistic view of student performance? 

‍

Manually - You can consider manually pulling data from these tools and adding them to a spreadsheet, Airtable, or plugging them into your CRM. 

Zapier or API - You can set up Zaps or APIs to bring your student data into one place, whether that’s a simple spreadsheet or a more complex Business Intelligence (BI) tool. 

Virtually - Virtually lets you port in data from across your toolset to bring your ABC’s into one place - attendance, behavior, and community engagement data. From there you can create reports to view that data side-by-side and auto-flag students that meet specific criteria. 

‍

Aggregated Views of Student Data 

Now that you’ve aggregated your data into one place, what are ways to view it in order to get a true picture of your student journey and catch early warning signs? 

‍

Determine Your Criteria - What might constitute an early warning sign for your program? If a student misses 2 classes alone, maybe that’s okay. But if a student misses 2 classes AND is 2 assignments behind AND hasn’t posted in your community tool for the past 2 weeks, that might be a clearer sign. 

Set Up a Flagging System - From there, it’s important to flag students that meet criteria you’ve designated. You can do this via automations in Google Sheets, Airtable, or using Virtually’s reports feature. 

Reach Out to At Risk Students - Review flagged students weekly so you can reach out to those in need. 

‍

Curious how to automatically aggregate your student data? Virtually can help. 

Schedule a demo here to learn if Virtually is right for you. 

Read Next: All About Attendance: See What’s New at our Upcoming Product Hunt Launch! 

‍