Note:Â This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.
Ronan Quirke: Welcome, everybody. my name is Ronan. I'm a product manager here at Orah. and we've got, some of the brains trust here at Orah alongside with me today. We've got, Matt, our CEO, and Kurt, one of our co founders, and our, senior product guru as well. And they'll introduce themselves in a second.
today's discussion is Orah.being asked a lot about, I think, when we've been in conversations with schools over the last couple of years, I'm guessing, but we rarely touch on it. And so I think it's an exciting opportunity for us to to jump forward a little bit and talk about.
Where things are going, especially, and the last year, we've really been laying the foundations for that future. And so there's a really good point. I think Kurt and I are a little bit too practical. We're a bit too,we want to make sure that we've got the here and now sorted out first, but, before we, we think about the big future, but now's a really good time because a lot of those foundations, as I said, yeah.
Are in place. So that's today's topic is about looking forward to the future of attendance. But before we get into that, maybe Matt and Kurt, you can say hi and introduce yourselves.
Kurt Meyer: Hi everyone, thanks for joining. yeah, as Ronan said, I run the product team and we've been doing a lot of work on attendance recently.and yeah, just excited to explore, what the next, iteration could look like. So hoping to keep this interactive and, looking forward to questions and, learning from everyone who's joined in as well.
Matt Varley: Thanks, Kurt. Hi, everyone. I'm Matt Varley, and I joined Orah in November of last year as CEO, working alongside both Kurt and Paul as co founders. Really excited about today's webinar and encourage everyone to get involved because this is an exciting piece of work that the team are going to be working on in the coming months, and your feedback is invaluable to us.
So looking forward to today's discussion.
Ronan Quirke: Awesome. Thanks, guys. and, yeah, let's, let's jump straight into it because, yeah,as both of you mentioned, we're really hoping to make this a little bit interactive and jump in with questions. Maybe we can solve some of these topics together. Maybe not everything today, but I think hopefully we can use this to, to advance the conversation.
But before we get into that, maybe we can, yeah, just talk. just a little bit briefly for those of you who aren't super familiar about, or itself, maybe, just give it a quick introduction.
Matt Varley: Yeah, that'd be great. If we could head to the next slide. and apologies for those, I know there's some familiar faces on this webinar.
You've probably heard this many times, but it doesn't hurt. Orah is now coming up to it's 10 year birthday founded in 2015. So this year will mark 10 operating across 20 plus countries, and closer to 350 schools now across the world. as a lot of people on this call know, Orah helps top independent schools meet and exceed their duty of care, by really focusing in on a couple of, core areas.
At Orah,duty of care for us is really around that physical, and mental, ensuring accountability and ensuring that all students are accounted for both physically and mentally. it is our mission and everything that we do, both from the product and the service that we deliver at Orah is orientated.
In making your lives easier to be able to up and elevate that duty of care of students in terms of the three pillars. And obviously, today we're going to be really honing in on the attendance pillar of where are my students super exciting, obviously, knowing where your students are very much fundamentally starts.
at, accuracy and completion of attendance. it's no good asking the question, where are my students? If that roll hasn't been marked. So we're diving right down into the depths. Of where it all starts and making it easier for teachers to be able to mark that roll no matter where they are so that attendance pillar really understands and answers that question of where are my students.
The second pillar, in terms of how we see the world, the duty of care is well being. So how are the students and this is where our nurture product comes in around mood checks, surveys and the overall well being of the students on campus. Now that third pillar being communication. So are we connected?
As a community within the school, teacher to student, school to parent, and parent to student as well. is everyone on the same page and are we able to effectively communicate across all of those stakeholders at the school?these three pillars come together, to provide, what we, see as duty of care.
And that is what the Orah platform strives to do for schools across the world. So super excited today. I'm going to hand over to Kurt as we dive into the attendance facet of duty of care today and how we can automate attendance. Over to you Kurt. Awesome.
Kurt Meyer: yeah. So topic for today is automated attendance. it's something that we've, dabbled in and have had made some, investments and over the years, uh, at Orah and, um, I can give some quick demos of what we have so far, but nothing really, within the classroom as far as, automated attendance goes.
So this, Yeah, we're really just focusing on in class attendance, as far as exploring, what this could look like.so to start off with, what's the point of automatic automated attendance? what's the, what's the value that it could create for schools? we'd love to hear what you all think that, automated attendance could bring, but.
from our end, saving teaching and admin time is a pretty obvious one.like the reality is no one likes taking attendance, it just has to be done. teachers spend a few minutes every class just to mark the roll. and yeah, that, that's just 10 percent of your lesson gone every lesson or, and the admins as well, constantly Following up teachers to take attendance.
It's just a whole lot of time spent that could be better spent elsewhere.data accuracy. even if, teachers do mock role when they're doing it. Quickly. there's still room for error. Um,so you don't have perfect data. I don't think perfect data is really, possible in a lot of cases, but you do need a base level of accuracy in order to generate your reports.
and to, simply know where students are, if role hasn't been marked. yeah, the teacher can go back and update it, the next day or a few hours later. But truth is, you don't know where the student is, from that period onwards, because the role wasn't marked on time.and the classroom experience as well.
Without that extra bit of admin, the teachers can just focus on the lesson. students don't have to, have that pause in the beginning of class. everyone just gets in and do, does what they were, there for. so it just streamlines that whole experience. It just makes it a better, experience for everyone, I think.
so those are a few benefits that, came to mind. is there anything? Yeah, we'd love to hear what you all think as well. Maybe could drop in a question and we can cover it in Q and A or is there anything that you would add to that Ronan or Matt?
Ronan Quirke: yeah, I was thinking to About, some of the schools and how they are working towards or do already have a kind of an open book policy in terms of showing those attendance records live to parents and other trusted contacts and how this plays into it as well because I know one of the challenges with that is.
That sometimes it takes time to correct inaccuracies and things like that. And so the live data needs correction and things like that. So that's again, another aspect where if there was more automation and that automation got things. Right immediately, I was able to correct things very quickly as inconsistencies were detected, then that would really help with that ability to be more transparent in terms of sharing that information to get to the students, trusted contacts.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, that's a good point. So even correcting the data takes time and, if it was more accurate and more efficient to just get the information you wanted, then yeah, we think that would be a good thing for everyone.so moving on to some of the challenges and, I talked to some schools who just.
Don't know why it's hasn't been done yet.they've seen the technology out there. They're like,I know it's possible. why isn't it?why can't we do it?and there's a few challenges around it. Um,so cost is a big one. Depending on what solution you go for, it could end up being quite expensive to implement.
a fully automated system, we're working with one school who, before working with us had already made an investment to installing iPads. In every classroom. so that's quite a big, implementation costs,hard to maintain technology. So you could have,if you're using fingerprint scanners or, RFID scanners and things like that, then that comes with an admin overhead.
You have to maintain them, make sure they're working. And if something breaks, then,IT has to come in and, figure it out. and sometimes it can create more work,maintaining the system than what it was supposed to save. And that's the worst case scenario. And you don't want to have to be spending more time maintaining it.
privacy concerns. So when you're getting into the realm of biometrics.whether it's fingerprints or, images or, students, then that has a privacy, consideration as well. so even the, student profile picture is considered. Biometric information these days. And so you have to make sure that you're,you're treating that, that information appropriately.
a lot of the solutions aren't actually built for schools. so they might be, a visitor management check in system or, something like that, but it wasn't built for schools to actually, to use. For this use case, which creates a lot of, this joint meant within the existing workflows.
so yeah, that's a few of the challenges. we'd love to hear if there's anyone who's actually, experimented with automated attendance or has a solution in place already, if there's any.challenges that you've come across that, I haven't mentioned so far, um, within Orah, we, we have a couple of ways to do attendance automatically.
We have a, feature called automated roles, which is quite a popular feature, outside of the classroom. so students can check into different locations, and you can schedule a role that would mark attendance. Based on, who was checked into that location during the period of that, that role was being marked.
And, students who check in, a certain amount of time after the role has started will be marked as late. so there's a bit of, configuration that you can do as well. It's quite a popular, feature. but one of the main things that, schools have been asking for is to be able to actually collaborate or be able to intervene and join in on that.
Automated role while it's running so that they don't want 100 percent automation. Sometimes I still want to go in and, make changes, to the role or, sign a seat and out. a fully hands off solution,doesn't seem like it's necessarily the right path either. and another issue that we come across, we have a NFC.
Sign in,solution for students as well. so we have these.NFC chips that, students can, schools can basically stick on a wall anywhere, within the school and they can associate that chip to a location. and the students can walk up to that and scan it with their phones to check into that location.
And, again, that's very Good solution for outside of the classroom. But, one of the challenges that we've had is that some schools, have a no phone policy within the classroom. so then, the, this sort of solution, might not be the best approach for those. schools as well. So yeah, there's a few things to navigate.
keen to, yeah, explore and see, yeah, what you all think. If, what the main kind of concern that comes to mind when you think of attendance automation is, and yeah, that, that would be super. Super helpful.yeah. Anything from your own end?
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. I thinkmany cases, the big challenge, I think, is that, the only universal approach to attendance taking, across all schools is the traditional teacher going through the roll, form factor.
And after that, it's, it's very much. new territory and down to each individual school as to what their culture or what their sort of preferences are. and so there is no one solution that's in the market at the moment, as you said, yeah. methods which require students having devices don't work for all schools.
Some schools have concerns about storing, Using facial recognition and things like that as well. So it's very much an evolving space for this. Lots of different tools, but no, not a lot of clear, solutions and not a lot of universal solutions, as well. So, yeah, I think that's what we're trying to get to is sort of, schools can see that they do have different bits and pieces of the tools.
Kurt Meyer: They've got I. D. Cards. Could we use the I. D. Cards? could we use devices? what can we use to to automate and streamline things? yeah, yeah. And as I say, there's, there's schools out there who think this should already be possible. They see. fingerprint scanners, vein scanners, facial recognition, GPS, they see all these technologies and they're like, why are we still doing this? And I think, yeah, as we covered, there's no, there's tools, but there's no solutions.
I think you, you summed it up well, Ronan.What would a true attendance automation solution look like, in our opinion?based on what we've learned so far, we think there needs to be a light level of human intervention, so not 100 percent automated. there still needs to be the ability for teachers or administrators.
to go in and maybe mark rolls manually if they have to make changes. so it can't be completely hands off. So there needs to be the ability to still interact with the roll in an easy, user friendly way. whilst all the automation is running, on schedule. So that seems to be an important part, Let's say 95 percent automated, 5 percent human intervention, like that might be a good balance,could be less, but, we think it's some, yeah, there needs to be a little bit of human involvement there for, to have a really effective solution, it needs to be fully integrated within the systems, As well as the workflows of a school.
so it can't just be some siloed system that you have to extract the data out and then transform it into the, into the format that you need for attendance and then reconcile that. And, it has to seamlessly work with all of your attendance systems and processes that you already have.
So absences, those are coming in at all times of the day, those need to come in and Be inserted into the system without any issues. Um,you need to be updating your systems of record, whether that's LMS,all of these things need to be working. your kiosks when students are arriving and leaving.
you want that all to be integrated within the solution, not just, a tack on. It needs to be part, like truly a part of, the way the school operates. And easy to implement hardware.so that, that will be an interesting one, for us to figure out. But the way that It gets implemented into the classroom has to be super simple has to be, affordable and, you can't be breaking down all the time.
Um,Yeah, we're thinking of what might be the best solution. We'll be keen to, hear what you all think as well. Um,we don't want to build any hardware, or, partner with, like a manufacturer or anything like that. we see ourselves as a software company, so we want to Develop the software and, integrate and partner with,existing devices and platforms that are already out there or schools might already be using so, yeah, for us, it would be a matter of, figuring out what options there are.
And, there does seem to be a whole space of, simple, easy to use affordable devices out there that we could integrate with.And so, yeah, we're thinking about what the best approach might be from a hardware perspective. But yeah, we kind of,we know it needs to be cheap and easy to use basically.
And just something that you could just leave to do its thing and not have to fuss about too much.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. As you said, we want to Be open to bringing the kind of the tooling, or the solutions that work for you. and Art's posted a comment, which I think is a good maybe example.
I might just Go through because I it's a good example as to what we need to solve for is, Art says he needs three solutions. One is enable a kiosk app for teachers, our teacher device to read NFC chips in the student IDs, enable the kiosk. for teacher devices to read the QR code for student ID, enable students devices to read QR codes as well.
So if all of those things are true, then you could use NFC and QR codes to set up the right checks. yeah, Makes a lot of sense. And we would love to do that if we can convince every other school to use the exact same system. but I think that's unlikely. So I guess where we're trying to go is, let's be able to have a platform that solves for Art's use case.
But also, if you want to do facial recognition, or if you had like a loud device in the school and you were using devices instead that those things will be possible as well as that's where we're getting to, right Kurt?.
Kurt Meyer: yeah, exactly. So whether it's. Yeah, we do need to find something that's going to fit the,the broad needs of schools.
QR codes sound great. the school that we're, working with that, plan to roll out at the next academic school year in the U. S. their previous system used QR codes, which for the most part seemed effective. it was mainly the, just the underlying system that wasn't.
Working well, that fully integrated piece, but as far as the QR codes go, I think the students had a QR code on the student ID. Then they just walked up to the iPad, scanned it, and then they were checked in. so in a situation like that, you could use the device camera for either QR codes, or you could use it for facial recognition.
So that might be like a hardware solution that would. fit both use cases, depending on the school. Like they might say, facial recognition isn't for us. too many privacy concerns, we've had QR codes before that works well. let's just use that,which would be fine.
Like for us, it's just,finding a common hardware that would be able to accommodate for those different use cases.
Ronan Quirke: yeah, Peter has a comment. This seems to be a great discussion. Cause we're getting lots of,Comments and questions, and I think both of them are very valid. But Peter mentions,for the tools, community users, culture, ease of use and adoption are all challenges. And I think that is, yeah, I think that's where a lot of this discussion is going.
It's, there's. Lots of tech. it's more about the adoption and what your community is comfortable with using because yeah, like personally, I feel like there's probably 30 different ways we could automate attendance taking with different, solutions and tools and hardware. but really it is.
Yes. what is that? And potentially, Yeah.maybe the brain trust that we've tapped into here in terms of the attendees. Maybe it's about coming up with a few different options and that we can say, Hey, like this. These are some of our schools are using these this way. and that might be something that sort of we could like.
Share with other schools and get them on board with using that, that, that approach as well, because maybe it's just a challenge that a lot of schools are having to invent this themselves as they go, rather than getting the support of providers like yourselves to give them a templated way.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. so I just want to talk about, what our approach has been so far.so we see automated attendance as the cherry on top of an already well built attendance engine.we don't think automated attendance is possible without a really good underlying attendance system.and once you have that, then automated attendance justtakes it to the next level, but, for the last couple of years, we've been building this foundation of integrations, getting schedules, managing records, reconciliation, getting the different workflows around absences to be working seamlessly with attendance, generating insights and alerts.
Like all of that is the meat and potatoes of attendance. And if your attendance solution doesn't have those things, then the automation doesn't matter because it's just going into a black hole. And so we think that you need this. Foundation and it needs to be built on a modern platform, a modern technology in order to have the real time, element of being able to take automated attendance.
so that's what we've been focusing on and we think we've gotten to a point where we have this foundation. it's not, perfect. There's still,areas that we can improve on, but we've got the main ingredients and, we've got the main components that we're bringing it together and crystallizing, the core engine around attendance.
And now we're thinking, okay, now that we've got this good engine, like what's the next step in, automated attendance is one of those opportunities that we think that. if we were able to, figure out those challenges, that we've spoken about around. The automation piece specifically and then integrated into our, attendance engine, then that would create, like an act, like a true solution, versus,these tools that aren't made for attendance, or maybe legacy attendant systems that aren't built for,the modern tools and technology.
so we're trying to bridge that gap and that's been our approach. So we. We haven't, by any means wanted to start with,but what seems like the most exciting piece we've taken a more, long term approach. And, but good news is we're getting, we're at that point where we feel like, we're ready to start exploring.
the next innovation.so yeah, that's how we see it. Hopefully that makes sense. Everyone. what do you think running? Does it make sense?
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, I think there's a couple of questions which touch on something about attendance automation, which I think we think about in Orah, but I think maybe we haven't made clear as well as that.
We're not just talking about the actual taking of roles when we talk about attendance automation. It's also about all those very basic things that we should be looking at like inconsistencies. For example, there's a great one. Sarah was. Absence for period 1, 2, 3, then mark presence, then mark absent for the rest of the day.
that's the sort of low value task that staff are spending time on spotting at the moment. That's another really good example of. Automation and how I don't even want to say AI because it's simpler than AI effectively, but that pattern spotting and I guess applying school policies and just making sure things are making sense in terms of the data, which has come up a few times in questions as well.
That is part of automation from our perspective as well. It's not just the actual taking of the role. It's actually looking at the data and making sure that it makes sense. I'm spotting those patterns because that's effectively. What a lot of staff are doing at the moment. and yes, I think a few people have mentioned that they would still like to have humans review the data to make sure it's accurate.
and I guess from our point of view, we just wanna make sure you're looking at the data that you should look at. And if it's, if it, if there's a whole other set of data which just makes sense and is consistent and it seems to be a very high prob probability of accurate, then. Don't focus on that focus on these other rec boards over here.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, that's a great point. it's it's automation Across the board when it comes to attendance not just marking the role, but also identifying gaps following up you know anything that is Costing, teachers or admins time and it's just like a, just a task that doesn't,doesn't require,someone to really get that deep into, it's just a, it's just a chore, like those things we just want to.
Get rid of so then you can just focus on the high value student engagement. actually following up students when you've identified that, they are unaccounted for, yeah, those are the things that we want to enable schools to be able to do instead of. the admin or just, making sure the data's accurate.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. I think there's a cultural thing as well. That has come up a few times in conversations we've had in schools. I'm not sure if anybody has any views in the webinar, but,But the role taking kind of ceremony for want of a better word within a class is an opportunity for a teacher to connect to each student and just put their eyes on them to see as a person doing what's their face looking and that kind of stuff as well.
And if we remove that role taking ceremony, then. Do schools still have the opportunity to do that? And probably it does need to change then in terms of because if you go back to our mission, it's about duty of care, which means the well being of students, and we don't want to take away that opportunity.
I think we just want to make sure that teachers aren't furiously, Making notes on their laptop, and they're actually being able to be present in the room for those students, but yeah, I think that's, that is something where, you know, if you don't have that ceremony in the classroom, then potentially,how do you do that?
That might force a little bit of a change in our, in thinking in terms of what happens in the classroom. That's like a softer aspect to it, but something has come up a few times as well,
which I guess brings into. The wellbeing aspect, which you know, we'll be back to talk to you about, still got a lot of, comments and questions. Thanks so much, everybody. And do jump in if you've got any more. I do have somebody who asked a question about, whether. This means you'll have ISAMs completed for the next academic year for Northern Hemisphere schools.
And that is a question we've been internally debating in terms of priorities ourselves. To be open and transparent about it, I don't think we are. I'm not 100 percent sure yet. if we're going to be able to squeeze it in. but, we do know that we have a number of schools that are asking for it. And we are keen to do that work.
It's just, just a question of. And I would, I was going to say squeezing it in, but I think that's the challenge for us. It absolutely not is a squeeze in to, to do something like a full attendance integration. and we do need to work quite closely with a number of schools to ensure that, an attendance, integration where we're writing attendance data back to your school records.
it is quite an involved process in terms of working with some pilot schools and making sure that data goes in correctly. And accurately, before we roll it out further. So I guess the challenge for us is making sure that we, we don't squeeze it in, that we have enough time and capacity to work quite rigorously and thorough with some schools.
And we know we do have some schools that are interested in working with us and we appreciate that. But, Yeah, I think, for now, I think, I'm not sure if I got the name of the person who asked that question, but,yeah, we are keen to, I'm sure you might already be, be in contact with us, but if not, do reach out because we'll.
The more people on the list, the better for us in terms of being not only being able to prioritize the work, but also to make sure that we do a really good job of it.
There's another person who asked a question, maybe Kurt, this is, this is when you can comment on,just asking about attendance insights, the. The only way to upload attendance insights at the moment is by linking an MIS or an SIS, and I guess both from the point of view of syncing attendance data from that system, are you taking class attendance in Orah, and that's populating the attendance dashboard, I think they're asking about extracurricular roles, boarding school use case for using attendance insights.
So
Kurt Meyer: the attendance insights can work with, or, taken data as well for, in class. So often schools get started by, connecting our insights dashboard. To their, SIS or MIS, but then eventually, they will adopt Orah for core attendance tracking.and what, once they use Orah for core attendance tracking, then we can still show the dashboard and it will be more, real time as well.
in terms of the day and boarding environments, I think We've got a pretty good handle of outside of the classroom and how that can work. That's our bread and butter and what we've been working with a lot of boarding schools around and our automated roles and NFC check ins. Um,they're not the I think there's still areas that we can improve on, um,that human intervention part of the automated roles.
but we feel like we, we've got that side of the picture pretty well covered with our existing platform. and we can make some spot improvements, but the core components are there. so the biggest missing piece is class attendance and having automation around that.but once we have that, then, yeah, I think we will be able to provide automation solutions both inside and outside of the classroom and ultimately leading to that better understanding of where are my students at any one time and, having that quality data to do, student engagement as well.
Hopefully that answer the question.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, thank you.
yeah, I think this has definitely been, A great topic. I think we've hit a record in terms of questions that we've had in a webinar so far. Maybe that tells me we were a bit overdue and getting into this topic and potentially something that we want to, review. I think I might also be a really, good one to, to open it up to some schools, maybe join as a panelist and discussing some of the current solutions and what they're grappling with,which is a great segue onto, to what we're working on and,
Kurt Meyer: yeah,We are looking for more schools to work with.
we've got one school that we're committed to having a solution in place for the next academic school year.but we want to build a solution for as many schools as possible, not just You know, not just, something that works only for one school. So we'd love to work with anyone who is interested.
doesn't mean that you're going to adopt it, but if you have ideas, if you like working with product teams, if you feel like this is something that is important for,the education space in general, and you just want to help us develop it, then yeah, we'd love to hear your feedback, Good, bad feedback, anything, it all helps us just get a better picture of, the right, direction. So if you're interested, send me an email, code at Orah. com. And I'd love to set up a call and, just kick things off with some exploratory conversations like today, but maybe more,more around your own experiences and what you think we could,what we should be watching out for or focusing on as we continue to develop and explore this, this opportunity.
awesome.
Ronan Quirke: yeah, I think we've covered a lot of ground there and we, we're at time. I just as a, as an aside, I did notice as we were talking about it, an auto automation and AI that we actually had a couple of. I am note takers joining the, the webinar as well, which just just goes to show you that, the stuff is coming fast.
but hopefully, if we work together, we can, we can come up with good solutions that kind of. Make sure that we keep the good things about how things work today, but, help you focus more on the student in the future. Perfect. We will leave it there for today. Thank you so much, everybody, for joining.
There will be follow up email. oh, shall we just talk quickly about the poll we just ran? Um,what are the, Oh, so they're all long answers. we did run a poll and we got lots of feedback from you, but they're all long answers. So there's nothing I can read out on the spot. So we'll get back to you in terms of sharing some of those insights with you.
Because, yeah, as we said, we're very keen to, to work together on this. Thank you so much, everybody.
Kurt Meyer: Thanks, everyone.
