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Kurt Meyer: Okay, hi everybody. Thank you for joining us today. Looks like we have a few people joining in. Annie, Brian, Jackson, James, Jim, Susan.
Thank you all for joining in. I'm here with Ronan who works with me in the product team and we've been doing a lot of work recently on improving attendance and improving. location, awareness of where students are. So we're excited to show you through all of that today.
And yeah, I look forward to any questions that you might have.
Ronan Quirke: Hi everybody. And yeah, as Kurt said, product team here at Orah and everybody here at Orah, we're super focused on building the right things for you as schools. Because we know how complicated and messy your lives are, and we're here to make that simpler. So yeah, big thank you for joining these sessions because your input and your feedback is what drives the product in the right direction.
So hopefully you'll see some of the feedback and input today that you've been providing us. And yeah, just jump in if you've got any questions as you go, as you think of them, and we'll answer them as we can.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome. Okay. So I'll just share my screen and kick it off. Is this showing up, Ronan?
Awesome. All right. Welcome, everybody. So for those of you who don't know much about Orah we work with about 300 schools around the world amongst them are the top independent and private schools and across 20 different countries and we've been around since 2015 so coming up to our 10th year and the main thing that we help schools with is to empower them to meet and exceed their duty of care for the students that they're responsible for.
So the way that we define duty of care at Orah is that duty of care means making sure students are accounted for both physically and mentally. It's all about helping schools create a secure and supportive environment. So that's what Orah is about. We're about helping schools meet and exceed their duty of care responsibilities.
And thinking about duty of care holistically, not just from a physical standpoint, but also from an emotional and mental standpoint as well. And ensuring that the school is providing that environment for students to achieve success. And duty of care. is core to Orah's philosophy and values because we originated from the boarding school environment where looking after students 24 7 was the main thing that we helped schools do.
And we've been able to expand that across the whole school recently. And so when we think about duty of care there's three core pillars that we focus on, and that's attendance, being, and communication. And these different areas answer fundamental questions that every school needs to have answers to every day. Things like, where are my students?
How are they? And how do we communicate with them? And having good answers to these questions is about, is yeah, what's necessary for a school to have world class duty of care. So if you have a really clear understanding of where your students are and how they're doing, then you're probably providing a high quality duty of care experience.
Whereas if you don't know where your students are, then it's hard to, it's hard to say that you really are on top of your duty of care responsibilities. So we try to develop our products with these four pillars in mind. Yep.
Ronan Quirke: I was just going to say is also, you're not, these things are ideally the activities that are your least amount of focus. So you're, they're happening. Naturally, I suppose it's possible in terms of your school processes as possible so that you're able to focus on the higher value tasks of identifying where you want to focus your energy in terms of. Development addressing issues and things like that as well because that's the other thing is that all schools are doing a good job of looking after students, but how much time are they spending on those basics versus actually being able to focus on more, higher value tasks that can really help, help students and the faculty.
Kurt Meyer: Absolutely. And yeah, so today we want to focus on the attendance piece and that question, where are my students? And specifically what we've done recently to help schools better answer that question. So knowing where your students are in real time.
That's the theme for today. So just to highlight a couple a few pain points that we typically see at different schools. So Often schools have clunky, outdated, hard to use tools. They have multiple systems to board tracking student location and attendance.
Which just gives a fragmented idea of where students are and, an overall sense of unreliability or confusion. There's a lot of manual data entry leading to inaccurate or lagging data. And ultimately this results in no real time understanding of where students actually are right now. So just to summarize how Orah keeps track of where students are we have a few different inputs.
We have class attendance and co curricular attendance. So as students are being accounted for during role checks, whether it's in class or field trips or any other co curricular activity, we can then update the student's location for when they were last seen. We can also use excuse forms or passes. So if a student is Going off campus for some reason, for lunch, or if they're excused from class because they're sick at home or in the boarding school then we would use an excuse form for that and then that excuse also has a location associated with it.
And we also have location check ins where students can check into a location directly or a staff member can check students into a location directly. And all of these channels come together to give you that accurate understanding of where students are. So I'm just going to talk about the left side of this process first and the different inputs. And how that looks, and then I'll move on to the end result and how that information comes together.
So I'll just give a quick demo of these these options here. So the first one is class attendance. And I actually don't have to open up the Orah app to demo that. I can show you that in our browser extension.
So we have a browser extension that schools can install on teacher or staff devices. And that just makes it easy for anyone to access their schedule and take attendance. So they could be in the LMS, they could be in the SIS or any other resource. And they'll be able to easily open up attendance and complete that.
And so we can see here that a lot of these students have been marked as president by default. But if anyone's missing, we can update their status, or if they're late, and we can see which students have a excuse which means they're not expected in class right now, and once that's completed, Then that's going to update the student's location, and that's customizable in terms of what that location is, typically it would be something like in class or on campus, and then you've got the most recent record of, um, where they were after that role check has been completed. We also have co curricular attendance, which would be similar to taking class.
Attendance, where a staff member or whoever's hosting the event would see that event on their calendar and then they can start attendance from there as well. Okay, so for the excuse forms, I'm gonna just jump into the Orah web app for a second. So excuse forms can be created either by parents, Students, staff members, or it could be created via a kiosk as well. So there's a few different ways that you could enable excuse forms to be created, but the simplest way is if the staff member creates it themselves.
So there's simply select a student hit pass or excuse, that term is customizable. And then they would fill out the excuse and assign the location for where that student is going during that period. And that then updates the student location as well. And you can see here on the right hand side, we have a list of locations that students are currently checked into.
And the other way that you can update a student's location is by selecting them and hitting location. So this means you can update a student's location directly without issuing an excuse form. And like this location here, and we can see student's location has been updated. So that can be updated through as I mentioned, a whole bunch of different channels or users.
So it could be staff, students. Or the kiosk app or parents. So through your day, daily processes, you're collecting all of this information and then it's resulting in an updated awareness of where students are. And the latest edition that we released.
Just two weeks ago is the location overview. So this is the feature that we're excited to showcase today, which shows you how all this information comes together to give you that real time understanding of where students currently are. So if we go back to the web app and under attendance, the landing page is going to be this overview page here. And I'll just talk through a few of these charts.
and explain how this page works and what the next stages are going to look like. So firstly, you have the ability to filter by different student groups. So you can filter by your houses or dorms, different student tags, as well as different SIS groups that you might have access to. So things like your different classes or athletic groups and things like that.
And this is relative to yourself who signed in. And here we can see which locations students are currently checked into. So we can see the majority of students are on campus, and in this case we have quite a few in the gym. And it just gives you like a high level breakdown of where your students are.
And you can also see which students, or how many students are in your different types of passes or excuses. And that also gives you a high level overview as well as which events are currently active and how many students are participating on them. And below here, we're visualizing where students are on this map. When a location is updated, then, um, we will update how many students are in that location.
So you can set up these locations and set up the geopoints across your campus or off campus for your most common locations. And any locations that don't have coordinates will just show up on the left hand menu here. And if you click on these It'll give you the location name, how many students are in there, so we can see that a few students in the gym and yeah, just different locations that you've set up. And if you zoom out, these locations will start to cluster.
So if you have quite a large campus or if you want to, get an overview of where students are within the vicinity of the school, then you can zoom out and these locations will cluster to give you like a general idea of where students are. And if you click on these, you'll zoom in to break it down into the separate locations. You can also view this map in full screen as well. If you want to have this up on a monitor or something like that.
And these locations will update in real time. So you don't have to refresh the page. You'll just update as soon as a student checks into a new location. And further below here, we have a table view of where students are.
So this makes it easy for you to search up a particular student and just find out where they are right now. So we can see Alexander, he's off campus, museum on a field trip. And you can click on that to see more information. You can open up the pass that's associated with it.
So it's just an easy way to find and track down students for what their current location status is. And by default, this list is ordered by check in time with the most recent ones at the top. But you can also filter by first name, last name, and switch between the ascending or descending order. So this is the first version that we've just released.
You all should have access to this right now. Anyone who has access to our supervised product will get this view here. And we're continuing to develop it, so we're keen for any feedback. feedback that you'll have but I can talk a little bit to what the next stages are going to look like as well.
Ronan Quirke: Before you do that, Kurt yeah, Jim has a question and I don't know the answer to it, so I might need your help here. Is, can you click on a location and view the name? So if you click in on the map view, I'm guessing Jim is talking about, can you drill down so far that you can actually see the actual names of the students? I don't think we've got that on the map view.
Kurt Meyer: Not on the map view, no. No, that's a good question. But if we so no, that's not currently possible, but I think that makes sense.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. So that's a good idea, Jim. Yeah. So being able to say, okay, I can see where everybody is, but if I want to have a look at who is in that, you can definitely do it off the home board and things like that.
But if you wanted to do it on this view, then yeah, that wouldn't be. Directly possible. Yes. And James had a question a few minutes ago as well.
Hey, James about co curricular attendance on the extension, which I can probably answer, but you'll be able to fill in some gaps as well. Excuse me. In terms of taking attendance. So we have, so that Chrome extension, maybe you can just open up that Chrome extension again Kurt, and we can have a look at it.
So that essentially shows. Your timetable for the day. And in terms of co curricular events, so there's two types, I guess there's events that are coming from Orah. Orah has the coordinate activities module we're looking at currently working on, bringing those types of events onto the timetable view as well.
So you could view them and also be able to take attendance for them. If you're, so that, that's all things that we're working on at the moment for Orah that will also enable us to, Do integrations where we're actually syncing events from other SISs as well. And how we're going to work that is we'll if it's possible to bring in events from your SIS there'll be another integration option to do. So we're looking at doing that with Veracross initially.
I think James, you're on ISAMS. I think we talked about that potentially. We will look at it on a case by case basis, if it's possible to get in. Events and bring them in so that you're, all your timetable items can be shown on that on that the roll check extension.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, that's right. It can work either way where you can set up the events in Orah, or we can sync them over from your SIS. And the attendance taking piece will be done in Orah. But just like classes, so all of these classes are being synced over from the SIS.
And you're just taking attendance in Orah. So if you still want to manage the event creation in your SIS, then that's completely fine, and we'll just sync it over to Orah like this. What we're currently doing with classes. Brilliant.
One thing I would also mention about events that we're working on is that often during an event, you have to take multiple, you have to take attendance more than once, say, if you're going on a field trip, you want to take attendance before you leave and when you return campus. So that's something that we're enabling as well, so that For an event, there's the ability to have more than one role check associated with it. Awesome. So I'm just going to talk a little bit to the next version of this overview page.
Sorry, we're in the design files here, but I'll just open this up in a preview. The next step Is to add these extra widgets at the top, and these will highlight specific actions and areas of concern that you should be aware of that might require a follow up or Yeah, a step from whoever is responsible for the overall understanding of where students are. For example, if a student has been marked absent in class, then that would be flagged here, so then that can initiate a follow up process. So you'll be able to look at that specific record, see which class they were marked absent for, who marked them, and then you might start a follow up process from there.
You can also see if there's any passes that are overdue. Say if a student left campus for lunch, but they didn't return when they said they would, then that would flag as an overdue pass. And you can also follow them up from there. Also overdue role checks.
So if you have a scheduled role check that hasn't been completed in time, then that would also be flagged. So then You can follow up directly from this page. This information is already accessible from different parts of the app, through different features. But, you have to go to different tables and pages to see each of them.
Whereas From this view here, you'll get a consolidated view of all of them in one place and easily be able to filter by the ones that you want to focus on and through different timeframes. So I think what that means is, if you're working in the boarding school or in the attendance office in the day school, and you just want to, you're just logging in and you just want to know what's the highest priority items. Then these two widgets here will point you in the right direction. So you don't have to go filtering and searching for what you need to be focused on.
And if you're using pass slash leave requests, then you'd also have the list of all your pending requests here. So you can almost do all of your high priority tasks in one place, as well as getting that overview of where students currently are. So this page becomes more of a landing page that brings together a lot of the different information that you're collecting around student attendance and whereabouts and highlights key actions that you might need to take to ensure that everyone's
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, it's really Yeah, bringing everything together, as you said, Kurt, and giving you that overview, but also showing you what's stopping you from having an accurate up to date view as well, if there's key workflows. Because really I guess the trick here is that we're using existing school processes and then tying locations and bringing it all together. We're not trying to add another thing on top that sort of tracks everybody in a different way. It's a, you already have attendance taking and process for excuses, management, and things like that.
Just making sure that if we bring it all together, also make sure that we've got like locations set for all of these things as well, and that, that brings it together itself. And then the key activity then from a school's point of view, just making sure everything is up to date, that If somebody's absent that it's followed up on pending requests are answered, are managed in a timely way, things like that.
Kurt Meyer: And I'd also mention that this list, this dashboard would be relative to whoever's looking at it. So you can set up different student assignments. So if you have different people who oversee different student cohorts, then you can assign each of them, their students. And so when they look at this, Page here.
It's only showing their students that they're responsible for. You can break it down. So that, different people have different levels of access to students and, you have the right people focusing on the students that they were responsible for.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. So if you've got to say the high school leadership team versus the middle school leadership team, they can each just be focused on that. And whereas maybe attendance manager and overall principal would have access to everything.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. One thing I would mention as well, which has come up before, so I'll just address it just in case, but we do have another dashboard called attendance insights. So I think it's important to understand the difference between these two dashboards.
So Attendance Insights is more about looking at trends through your past attendance data so that you can make more informed decisions to help improve your overall attendance rate, whether that's specific, working with specific students or specific cohorts or classes. The Attendance Insights dashboard gives you that. longer term view of where you're trending from a attendance perspective. Whereas this new dashboard that we've created, this is a real time dashboard which helps you understand where students are right now so that you can keep on top of your day to day duty of care responsibility of knowing where students are while under your care.
So two different dashboards and, um, super important use cases, but quite fundamentally different. Okay. I'm just going to, there's no other questions. I'm going to jump to the webinar.
The deck again. So I just wanted to talk a little bit to integrations and Ronan leads. The team on the integrations front, but we have deep integrations with a few SIS partners. So Blackboard, Veracross, TAS we've been doing a lot of work with recently, but we're also developing the other ones that we work with as well.
And typically we have a base level of integration where we can sync over students and contacts and things like that. But there's another level of integration where we can also sync the class schedules, the events the attendance information, the passes, and the absences, and have those flowing in a way so that Orah can function as the main interface for Tracking attendance and knowing where students are, but also send all the key information back to the SIS for your course system of record for all the academic transcripts and reporting things like that. Yeah, Ronan, or, what we're working on next?
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, so I guess one thing to call out is that very often a key step in the process of doing the deep integrations is working directly with a couple of pilot schools, because as hard as we might try, it's very hard to replicate the Complexity of every real world school, and so working with some customers to work through that pilot is super important. We're always interested in working with you and understanding your use cases because every school has slightly different processes at the outset in terms of attendance management and understanding where students are. And so understanding how those things fit in and also how your data works is a key part of that probably is as much as the actual kind of.
development itself. That piece is super important. So yeah, so thank you. If you have already given feedback or if you're keen to work with us in terms of deepening the integrations then please do let us know because that's super important.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, awesome. So I've already covered the next step for the the overview page, but we're also as we mentioned, working on the ability to take attendance for events, which stay tuned. They'll be coming up over the next month or so. So we're doing some release communications when that's live.
So if you're interested in getting started with attendance or improving, how you're currently using Orah or potentially adopting Orah for the first time, then Feel free to reach out to me directly, cura. Orah. com or you should receive a recording of this webinar as well as a follow up email and you can respond directly to that to get in touch. Okay.
Doesn't seem like there's any other questions. So if there's nothing else, I think we can wrap it up and leave it there for today. Awesome.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. Thanks everybody.
Kurt Meyer: Thanks, everyone. Thanks so much for joining.
