School districts looking to answer critics demanding more accountability can now turn to a tool that business has long depended on -- the data warehouse.
IBM this week will introduce a new services and software bundle that will enable school districts and institutions of higher education to set up data warehouses to monitor student and teacher performance. The Insight at School package, which will be unveiled at the US National Education Computing Conference, produces multi-year data warehouses that help teachers and administrators spot trends and evaluate curriculum at the classroom, building and district level.
Schools that have already implemented data warehouses use them to analyse attendance patterns and determine areas in which students are testing poorly.
The package includes a variety of IBM software, including the DB2 Universal Database and Visual Warehouse for data extraction, transformation and loading. Business Objects' namesake query tool enables users to analyse the data once it is in the warehouse.
The bundle runs atop a Windows NT server.
Typical packages are up and running in 20 weeks, while custom packages can take up to six months to implement, according to IBM officials.
Insight at School is being sold both as a package with a one-time charge and as a hosted offering with a per-student charge.
Filling in the gaps In addition, IBM will announce that it is offering its Lotus Domino-based Learning Village platform as a hosted service. The software provides templates that teachers can use to build lesson plans and activities designed to meet state education mandates.
Joseph Kirkman, executive director of education technology services at the Broward County Public Schools, has seen how a data warehouse can provide a wealth of untapped data to administrators, principals and teachers.
Before his district installed a data warehouse with the help of IBM Global Services a couple years ago, "they didn't get as much information," said Kirkman. "At the school level they got what was generated in the classroom and the district and state tests. ... That was about it."
