Transcript

Note: This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.

Ronan Quirke: Hi, everybody, and welcome to the webinar. This is Ronan from Orah. I've got Kurt alongside me this morning as well. We'll say hi in a second. People are just joining, but we've actually got quite a lot to cover today, so we probably will gradually get started and let people join as we get along, so that by the time we get into the really good stuff, everybody should have joined by then.

Anyway, so yeah, without further ado, Kurt, want to say hi?

Kurt Meyer: Yeah. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining in. Vernon and I have been busy over the last I'm not just running nine run and I, and, the whole product and development team have been busy over the last few months, making improvements to the attendance product.

So we're keen to, share, all the updates that we've been working on.but yeah, can jump into it.

Ronan Quirke: Yeah. And just to say that we're going to be, currently is going to be covering a lot of ground. I'm just going to be keeping an eye mostly on questions and but yeah, I think because we're, we've got quite a lot of things to cover, we'll probably take questions as we go as we're looking at different bits and pieces.

so yeah, do feel free to just, pop a question as you think of it and we'll probably try and get to them as we go.

Okay.so a little bit about us for those who don't know. we were founded about 15, 2015, about 10 years ago. we work across over 20 countries for over 300, top independent private schools. And the main thing we focus on, is helping schools meet and exceed their duty of care.

Kurt Meyer: So we started in the boarding, environment and still very much, catered to boarding schools. but we've been extending our, our solutions around duty of care to the wider day school as well. So what does duty of care mean to us at Orah? Duty of care means making sure students are accounted for both physically and mentally.

so knowing where they are and how they're doing.

And there's three pillars of duty of care that we focus on, which is attendance, being, communication, answering some key questions in these areas like, where are my students? How are they feeling?and how do we communicate and do we communicate with them? Sorry, typo there.so those three categories is what we, focus on around the duty of care space.

So without further ado, we want to talk more about the where are they category specifically around attendance and, go through some of the improvements that we've made to Orah, over the last few months.

Ronan Quirke: Yeah, I think it was maybe December that we last did an update on this wasn't great. So this is basically covering what's been happening the last sort of month and a half, two months.

Kurt Meyer: Yeah. And even in that, even as I was putting this date together, we've covered quite a lot of ground over those months. yeah, I'm looking forward to sharing what we've been working on.

So I'm planning just to have a slide to guide the main categories and then I'll jump into a demo.so first thing I want to cover is some improvements that we've made to the attendance marking, workflows for teachers.so the first one is multiple active passes. So if I jump over to my demo account, actually, I can just pop over the browser extensions and, if I open class here, we can see that, Abigail, she has two active classes.

before, the way that our system worked is that a student could only have one active pass at a time.in certain cases, especially if you have, multiple departments using Orah, say, the health center, the boarding school, the main school, or, the athletics department, they might all have issued a pass that overlaps.

And the way our old system worked was that,the latest pass that was issued would Be created, that would take priority and all the other passes would end. So there was no way for a student to have multiple passes.you can see here we've got two. they both overlap, but only the exam pass is shown on the student record.

that, the way that it works is that the pass with the most recent, start time. Would be the one that takes precedent in terms of attendance. So within the context of this class, exam leave, started first. No, sorry.yeah, exam leave has the most recent start time, so it didn't start first, but it started after the health center, so that's the one that's the most recent, and the thinking is that's the most recent, update of where the student was relative to this class, so that's the one that we prioritize.

it's also useful in the boarding school context, because, those of you who are from boarding schools know that there could be a variety of reasons why, a student, Could be on leave or could have a pass, whether it's on campus or off campus. And this allows you to layer up those passes, so that you don't, you're not ending ones that you want to continue on, inadvertently.

we've also updated the interface here. So it's really simple for teachers. even if they haven't had, even if they don't understand all that, that I just explained from a teacher's point of view, when they're marking attendance, if the student's in front of them, if the student's showing up to class, then simply, they'll be asked, is the student here?

Yes, mark attendance. and then we'll make changes to the passes accordingly, confirm that, and then the teacher can mark the student as present. If a student has an excuse for a pass, then they're not expected to be there, but if a student shows up and they're in front of them, then the, the teacher is prompted to actually mark them as, attended.

this is optional, so you don't have to give teachers this ability, but, we find that most schools do because, they want, yeah, they want that accurate account of where students are. So if a student is actually in class and has been seen by the teacher, then. They would prefer that to be, captured.

So that is multiple active passes. We've also got a Sorry,

Ronan Quirke: I was just gonna, just thought of a question that maybe others might be thinking as well is that, you mentioned the ending a pass setting is optional, but the multiple active passes is an optional Configuration as well, isn't it, Kurt? Yeah, so you don't, it's your choice as a school if you want to have the ability to have passes, running alongside each other.

Kurt Meyer: Yes, that's right. yeah, exactly. It's optional, so you don't have to enable that. It's, it's an opt in feature.

the other thing that we have, and I'll jump to the prototype to show it, is in class dismissals. So if a, if a excuse is starting during the class period, then the teacher will see this, upcoming excuse on the side here. initially, the teacher might mock them as present because they were there for the start of the class, but the teacher knows that, okay, 10 minutes into the class,the student is actually going to be leaving.

so they're aware of that. They're on the same page. So when the student stands up and. That's leaving the class there. they're across what's going on there. And, at that point, the excuse would then update the attendance record that the student was excused, during that class.

So that's the in class dismissals. and we've also, increased the role marking window or given more customization around it. So as a,

as a administrator.

You can control the amount of time that a teacher has to mark their role.this will, previously was fixed at, two days, but now you can change it, up to six days. So that just depends on the school, be able to give teachers more or less time to, update their attendance record. Once it goes past that window, then only the attendance managers who have those permissions would be able to update the attendance record and not teachers.

And that's just you don't, once you've passed that window, you're not worried about teachers going back and changing anything.that happened two weeks or a month ago, those records are locked in, only your administrators are able to edit them after that window.

So those are a few improvements that we've done to the attendance blocking, for teachers. The next thing that I want to look at is some improvements we've made to, record management, around the attendance records.

so we've added this, this is a, this was an existing table, but we've, updated it.so previously, the student attendance records would just show all of the completed attendance records, and it wasn't grouped by student. but now we've organized the attendance records for each student for each day.

And so when you're looking at a particular day, you've got all your students here. You can search up a student and you'll be able to get a visual of what their attendance is looking like for that day.we also didn't have not started or in progress attendance records. So you wouldn't, it wouldn't be easy to identify if there was a gap in the schedule because you could only see what, had been completed.

So if a teacher had forgotten to take attendance, you wouldn't see that gap in their schedule. But now it's quite easy to identify. it's all organized, based on. Based on with when each class is scheduled. it gives you a visual of, what attendance looks like that day. Let's see if I can, mark a student.

There we go. You

can see here, this is an example, but you would expect to see, present, absent, late, all the different classes.and if they have an excuse, you'd see, that they're excused for those classes as well.so that's the first thing, the attendance table. we're finding that quite often, people were going to the student's profile and looking up their records to get this sort of overview, but now you can do it.

Just directly from the student records page, and you can see all of the students at the same time and quite easily switch between days and, we think this is a, would make it a lot easier to, get that full picture of what's going on with attendance on a day to day basis.so that's the new student record table.

We've also included role history within the attendance record. So this shows you all of the events. That, happened to this record and gives you a paper trails of changes. So we can see here, the student was, initially unmarked. But then one of the, teachers marked them as present. so it just helps with the detective work if you're wondering,what's going on with a particular excuse and how,what events led to that.

so it just helps administrator a better piece, get a better overview. the other thing that we've done is that we've linked passes to the attendance record as well. So if the student has an excuse.you're able to see, which, which excuses overlap with that attendance record.so as I mentioned before, the most recent excuse would take precedent.

So we've got an exam leave one here, and you can click on that directly to open up more information. So now you've got the past record. You can see when it was scheduled, when it was actually started and ended. you'll be able to see the history and notes around that past record. And you can make any changes to that or edit the, actual start and end time.

but it's all in one place. Before we were having people go from,this page to the home board or the student profile to try to figure out which paths the student had. But now you can do all of your, edits and sort of detective work around any, student. Attendance record from one place and that's the student records page.

might have mentioned this in one of our previous webinars, but I'll just mention again for anyone who missed it. But this concept of start and end time, is something that we introduced late last year. So this, the actual start and end time is what.we use to excuse students from classes.so you might have a scheduled time, but the actual time is, what we considerthe time that's relevant in terms of attendance.

And, if you make any edits to the actual start and end time, then that's what, is going to be reflected on the attendance record.

Hopefully that makes sense. I'm, happy to answer any questions at all that come up.

Ronan Quirke: Yeah, thanks. Good. yeah. Art had a question,when will we see the student record for you with the bubbles on an individual student's profile? So I guess He's liking what we have here. But, yeah, I guess there's still a lot of people are keen to work from the student profile view.

Kurt Meyer: Yeah, that's, that's a good point. We have made some improvements to the student profile, which I'll touch on as well. As part of this demo, and we're planning to further extend that to include the student schedule, make improvements to the student records page as well. so that's definitely in the.

Our intent is to, yeah, improve the student profile and enable some of these key workflows there. but we thought that the student records view, especially from, someone who's looking at these records every day and just wants that daily overview of what's going on and they may not necessarily know which student, to follow up on, but this gives them, that bird's eye view.

So this is where we, started from.

Thanks for the question up, please. throughout any other questions that you have.so the next category that I wanted to cover is attendance concerns, triggering concerns, tracking concerns, leaving comments and updating the status and also insights around concerns as well.

so I'll start off with, how to trigger a concern. So within attendance settings, we have a section for alert settings.alert settings, will eventually change to concern settings.but within an alert, you can set up a criteria for a specific attendance pattern that you want to track.

in this case, It's pretty straightforward. Any student absent for any course, one time in total, within this period will trigger the concerns. And we're notifying the specific staff members, but we've also added this, concern status option at the bottom. So when this criteria is met, it will trigger the alerts that have been set up.

But it will also create an, a concern record and you can set what the status of that concern record should be. Initially, it can either be opened, action needed or concern closed.and once that concern has been created, you will see, a list of all the concerns under this attendance concerns, table here.

In terms of load, might jump to

a different account. Sorry, I set that account up for the webinar, but

I forgot that we wouldn't have any concerns, but

Ronan Quirke: here

Kurt Meyer: we go. within this table, you'll see a list of all the concerns that have been triggered.you can easily filter by different timeframes or custom timeframe and pretty straightforward. these concerns would be as a user, it's based on what students you have access to.

So based on how you've set up your user roles and your own permissions, the user looking at these concerns are only going to see the concerns that they have been given access to.

Ronan Quirke: so if I was like a tutor for Abigail and Francis, then I would only see Abigail and Francis, concern records. Yes.

Kurt Meyer: Yes, exactly. And, within the concern itself, it'll give you an overview of who was alerted, what the criteria for triggering the concern was, and which records met that criteria.you can also, have an internal dialogue with other staff members and tag in, other staff members as well if, if you want to, have multiple people involved in addressing the concern.

there's a history log of everything that's happened and you can also manually change the status of the concern as well. So if it started off as concerned open, you can change the action needed,if you just want to elevate it in terms of priority and then close when you feel like it's been addressed and in terms of all the comments that can be captured in here as well.

so it's just a, we found that we were, triggering a lot of alerts. Which prompted staff members, to identify different, attendance patterns, but we weren't providing a good way for them to follow up,in a consistent way and to capture that follow up process and have a, record of, what happened and was it actually addressed and So it just closes the loop in terms of once you've found a student who, might need to be engaged with it.

You've actually got the right processes in place to, follow through and address anything that's come up.

Ronan Quirke: Yeah. Art has got a, another good idea. Maybe we can maybe just explore it real quick. he's suggesting adding a contact dialogue to concerns and include the first of earth center contacts. So I'm guessing.

Yeah, we're, would this be useful for if, if this concern was triggered, if you've been absent five times, for example, maybe it'd be useful to see the alert that was sent to the student and their contacts before it, it elevated to a concern, maybe, yeah, maybe they got an alert when they were absent two times, maybe just seeing some of that sort of history of, What was sent to them, I can see how that would be useful in terms of the context of digging into this, this particular concern with this student, a student centric kind of a view of everything that has been sent relating to those absences.

Kurt Meyer: Yeah, for sure.we do intend to eventually havea list of concern records on the student profile as well.so I think that they'll be heading in that direction. Yes. but now you can also, search for a student on this page, and it'll just bring up all the concerns related to that particular student within the timeframe.

Yes.

Yeah, that's, I think involving contacts as well as an interesting idea so that it's not just a internal approach, you can engage with the students and the parents, and have, that, that. Everyone on the same page and, collaborating around that student.

sorry, I just jumped back to my slides. Oh, yes, and the last one is Concern Insights.so on the Attendance Insights dashboard, we've added a new widget for Attendance Concerns.so this just gives you an over an overall view of how many concerns have been created within that time frame for the students that you filter to, how many have been closed, and what was the average time to close.

so just a few broad insights to give you a sense of, yeah, how well are your team responding to these concerns?

And the idea is that the better you are at addressing these attendance concerns, you should be able to improve some of your attendance metrics, whether it's tardiness or attendance, whichever areas that you want to focus on.

Okay, so that rounds off attendance concerns. We're quite excited about the possibilities with that and keen to continue building it out. So just let us know if you have any. Further feedback if you want to jump on, with the feedback call with either Ronan or I would love to, explore any other ideas that you have.

so student insights as well. So I'll jump over to the student profile and, can talk through what we've done and where we're heading with it.

so earlier this week, we updated the student profile layout. It's not that much different from what we had before, but we feel like it, gives us more ability to expand, the type of content that we display in the profile.initially, the student details page is the default, but, you're able to set the default tab.

As a user, so whichever tab you use the most, you can make that default. So whenever you go to the student profile, that's the tab that you'll start with.we've also included SIS groups, within the student profile as well, whereas before it was only houses and tags. But now you can see, all groups that the student belongs to.

Um,we've recently added attendance insights to the student profile as well. So this is similar to, the dashboard that shows all students, but just focus on one particular student. So you've got your, you've got your attendance metrics.

and then you've got those metrics broken down by the different courses that the student is enrolled in as well.so it gives you a good idea of,how a student is tracking in terms of attendance, for themselves. And you're able to, open up these records, to get a better understanding of, this is just a demo account, they've been excused absent for all of their classes.

you'll be able to dig a bit deeper and say, okay, why are they being excused absent,what's the type of excuse and, is that something that. Could drive a conversation, with the students or parents, and so the plan for the student profile is to, include other things like the student schedule,we mentioned before, it would be great just to zoom in into one particular student, get an idea of their schedule and what their attendance looks like, from that view.

we want to reorganize the student records as well, just so that's a bit easier to filter and sort through. We've had a lot of feedback around how these records could be better, better organized.we also want to bring together other types of insights, not just attendance insights. So if you're using, Nutri for Wellbeing or Behavior to incorporate some of those insights as well.

so then when you're zooming in on a particular student, you might be able to see correlations between attendance and behavior, which often, there is, a relationship. And so you just have more data to work from.things like the activity feed is something that we're considering as well.

So we have this overall activity feed, which is just,an update of everything that's happened, a timeline. Of events throughout the day. But looking at that on a particular for a particular student.yeah, lots of ideas. this was just the first step. Just, setting the foundations again for the profile.

And, we're keen to continue building it out.

Ronan Quirke: Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I think, I guess originally we were thinking that some of the separate reports would be where schools were going to be finding the most use, but, a lot of feedback from schools themselves as well. no, we really like the student profile. We really, we use that student centric view quite a bit, which is what drove a lot of the.

The changes here. So yes, a big thank you to the schools for providing feedback on that, because that was something we were thinking. Maybe everybody wanted to have a look at the macro view of all the students together, but it seems to be that a lot of your sort of day to day. You want to look at the individual a bit more, which is why we're incorporating and a lot of that data back into the student profile.

yeah, so keep the suggestions coming.

Kurt Meyer: Yeah, for sure.and,as an example, if you're a teacher and you just want to zoom in on a student without having to look at the dashboard anddigest that all of that information, just quickly go into the profile. You get like a really simple overview of their.

Attendance. And as a teacher, maybe that's all you need. You just need to know, okay,how many times have they been late or absent for my class or the different classes? Is it just my class or was there other classes that this behavior is happening on as well? yeah. Zooming in on a student has been, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

so the last update that I wanted to cover, which, has been a significant, improvement to the way that we handleattendance records.so we've introduced a new type of attendance called daily attendance. for those of you who use Veracross, they have a similar, concept and daily attendance, tracks a student's attendance on a, day by day basis.

whereas whereas Typically, we're tracking attendance on a class basis, but, similar to classes, schools also want to know, okay, were they present at school for this day? It might only be one class or two classes, but were they here for a day or not? do they show up late or were they absent for that day?

And so that daily attendance view can show a very different. Story to class attendance, because showing up late to school for the day is a different behavior than showing up to your classes late.for example, also, a lot of the government reporting usually only cares about, a day, a daily attendance view over a longer period of time versus, very granular class attendance.

so we felt like this. This concept of daily attendance was quite important for us to, be able to track as well.so I'll talk through how we're tracking daily attendance and, how we're incorporating daily attendance into our insights as well.within attendance settings, under general settings, we've created a new section for daily attendance.

So this is where you can set up your daily attendance policies, and the way that daily attendance works is that we will take all of your class attendance and based on your class attendance records, we will assign a daily attendance status, using, different rules that you can set up. So these rules can be applied to different year or grade levels, becauseoften it's different for the, younger year levels and the older year levels.

so you can assign different policies to different year levels. and the default policy that, we've set is all classes throughout the day. And this table gives sort of a description of what that means. if a student is present for the day, or if a student is present for their first scheduled class of the day, Then they'll be marked as present for the day.

If they're late or absent for their first scheduled class but attended later classes, then they're late for the day. If they're excused absent for all of the classes throughout the day, then they're excused absent for the day.and if they're excused absent or unexcused absent throughout the day, then they'll be marked as unexcused absent, for the day.

And as you So your class attendance records might Be constantly changing. a student might be absent to start off with, but then you realize that they were actually excuse and Ukrainian excuse. so the daily tennis record will update as these updates happen to your class record. we're constantly checking to see if there's any updates to the class.

Attendance records. And if there's anything new, then we will update the daily attendance record, as well. Sothey both stay aligned, as you update your records.you could also set the policy to first scheduled class of the day. So this is a simpler model. It just looks at the first class of the day.

Usually this is what, younger grade levels would have. because typically they only have one, say, homeroom class, and then they,could, go to the different classes as a group.but for the younger grade levels, you might have only the first scheduled class of the day, any class, or you could set it to a specific class type.

and then, yeah, we'll just be looking at that first class of the day, and then that determines what their, daily attendance status is.

so that's how you set up the daily attendance policies. Even if you're not using Orah for tracking attendance records and we're just pulling in records from your SAS, you can still apply these policies.

and so what you'll notice on the attendance insights dashboard is that you can toggle between class and day attendance on some of these. Widgets. So under your attendance metrics, I'm looking at classes, but if I switch to days Yeah, we can see on a day by day basis. This is what attendance is looking like versus on a class basis So we can say if we've got seven point seven percent Unexcused absence rate on a day by day basis

you can also look at the daily attendance on the Trends view of a time We're planning to add daily attendance to these other student centricwidgets so that you can see, okay, who's the top 10 most unexcused absence on a class basis, but also on a day basis.at the moment, it's only showing on a per class basis and in the table at the bottom here, we've also included the, daily attendance, counts as well.

So it would show you, yeah, how many unexcused absence, on a per class or per day basis. And you can export those records and it will include both classes and days.so we're, this is also in the student profile. So you can, switch between class and daily.within the student records table, we're planning to include a daily attendance status, on each of these students as well.

so you can see in one view both their class attendance. Records and their daily attendance record. so that's coming soon. what we do have live at the moment is that you can do run an export of daily attendance records only.so if you wanted to see, yeah, which students were. present absent, on a day by day basis within a given timeframe, you can export those records directly.

so that's what we have for now, and we'll be adding the record onto the interface itself,

Ronan Quirke: in the coming weeks. That just sparked a question in my head, which might quickly come up for schools as well, Kurt, is that, so you need to obviously have those daily attendance rules in place. First to start generating, those daily attendance records.

And so that will start from whenever you first,the first day that you, you configure the, that daily attendance, right? so if you're, I guess the advice would be then if you want to start using that, the sooner you configure it in Orah, the better. So you start generating those daily attendance records alongside the, the role records.

Kurt Meyer: Yeah. So we. You should see a default policy assigned, but you can change the policy, and, we will update daily attendance records,up until a point, and, yeah, it depends on what time you're doing it, because we don't want to update daily attendance records over multiple academic Years, so we tried to, cut it off at the start and end of an academic year, so you can only update your daily tenure sprinkles up until that point.

we've assigned all classes throughout the day as a default. We think that should cover most cases anyway, even in the younger year groups, and they may only have one scheduled class of the day. Yeah, that you take attendance like this policy should still work. So,if there's any questions or if you need help configuring your policies or updating records retroactively, just let us know.

We'll be happy to, work through that. but our intent was that, it's going to start tracking records, already and the policies that are the default should, fit in most schools.

Awesome. so that was everything that I wanted to cover. Those are the big,projects, but we've been doing a lot of all finer grained. Improvements and, like iterations as well.we've got a lot of UX improvements planned for the parents and on the student facing kiosks, which we're currently working through.

but yeah, we've been making a lot of, progress on the attendance front and I think we should start seeing, that whole experience, getting a lot more polished over the, coming weeks and months. Yes.

Ronan Quirke: Awesome. Yeah. quite, quite a lot that we covered. And yeah, attendance marking, record management improvements, attendance concerns, student insights, and daily attendance.

yeah, a lot to take in there. pretty much everything is available if you are using attendance. It's already in your account. There's nothing I could think of that you wouldn't have. It's just a question of. Maybe configuring it or, or jumping into the right screen. speaking of that, just another suggestion around, and I think this is one, Kurt, we've talked about a little, but I think we're getting a lot closer to being able to do it is, having school term and year.

Filters. So being able to look at by a semester, this school year, last school year, I think, a while ago, it was quite hard for us to get that. But now that we're getting this, the school schedule and everything like that from the SASs, I think we're getting quite close, aren't we?

Kurt Meyer: Yeah, I think so. it's becoming more and more of a need. And,

the way that we've been handling it so far is using a custom range, but that still relies on the school to You'd have to set that up. But yeah, I think that would be, that would make a lot of sense to be able to just pull over the academic school years and terms and have those as available filters.

I just wanted to mention for anyone who's not aware how to keep up to date with these.improvements as we're working on them. So in the web app, we've got a announcements, a link. So in the upper right hand corner, if you click on that and that icon there, it'll take you to a page which has a log of all of the updates.

and we typically release this, within a few days or. that update going live and this will give you so pretty much everything that I've covered so far has been logged here. But if you want to keep up to date, this is a good place to, see everything. And then you can also, opt in for email notifications, so that you're notified as soon as something goes live.

Are we doing on time that, yeah, that was a lot to cover and I'm not surprised that it's taken us almost an hour to get through all of that. but hopefully it shows everyone, just how much progress we're making on this front. And,this is a lot of this has happened over the last. A few months and, really looking forward to what we can do, and a few more months.

So if there's any feedback that, you all have would, love to sit down and, pick your brains, you could email me at curt at Orah. com.we'd love to, set up a time, or you can, respond to the follow up email that will come after this webinar as well.

Ronan Quirke: Yes, yeah, we will be sharing a recording.

Don't worry if, you didn't catch everything, I think I'll probably need to watch this. A second time to catch up on everything we went through myself. yes, we will definitely be doing that. And, yeah, as I said, yeah, feel free to reach out to us. We're really keen, especially with these features that we're just recently developing.

I'm sure there's things, little improvements we could be making based on your feedback as you put it into real world use. do please let us know because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that it works well for you.

Awesome. Perfect.we better leave it there. Let everybody get back to their busy days. so big thank you for everybody who joined and thank you Kurt and we will see you again soon.

Kurt Meyer: Thank you everyone.

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