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Kurt Meyer: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. yeah, excited to share the updates today and, I'll just be here to field questions and if there's any. Questions that you have, feel free to put it in the Q& A and I'll, share that to Ronan or we'll circle back at the end to go through those questions.
Ronan Quirke: thanks Kurt. just to cover off how what we're doing today fits into the rest of our products. So we've got attendance and student care and really communications is The third pillar, but I think of it more as the wraparound, student care and attendance. It's the thing that the gel, that, get makes everything work, right?
any communications. and it's also a thing which, there's never when you're talking to people in groups and teams, or organizations, better communications is always something that, that comes up as something people would like to have. and so that's what we're going to be talking about. a little bit today.
which is communications built for schools because, what we've seen as we've spoken to many schools of the last, couple of years is a real need for communications tools that actually make sense, for schools. There aren't, there is no shortage of communications tools around there, but schools have specific needs and today we're just going to be covering over some of those things and also the reflecting on the journey we've come in terms of, building for those, but Kurt, I just thought of maybe ask you to cast your mind back. It's, over two years, now, since we first started on communications and maybe you can just give us an insight as to why we even started.
What was the driver in the first place around communications?
Kurt Meyer: Yeah. um, as we were talking to schools, there was one piece of feedback that really, struck me just broadly speaking about communications and that's, We live in a post email world, especially for students. So when you, when we're talking about communications, a lot of the existing systems are still very much email based. And as all of you would know, if you're communicating with teenagers, good luck getting them to reply to your emails.
It's hard enough getting adults to do that. and so there was a technology gap in terms of how schools are connecting and communicating with their students. which we're getting a lot of feedback from our customers around, so that there's, that's one thing. And the other thing is, going back to our core, mission around duty of care, the way schools communicate with students.
is very much in line with our mission at Orah. there are a lot of, duty of care, concerns and liabilities with regards to communications, how staff members are communicating with students. and currently, a lot of that, those sorts of communications happen in social media platforms. Thank you.
so different, things that schools don't have the right oversight and privacy controls over. the tools available, even though they were, within the same generation of what students were used to, had all these other, drawbacks. So, there was definitely a gap there between the two, the two options available for schools, and, we felt that it was, very much in line with, what we're trying to achieve in our around duty of care and you know, it made sense for us to deepen our, capabilities around communications.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. Thanks, Kurt. and just, an example, this weekend, in one of our kids schools, a teacher, Was contacting the principal saying, Hey, this parent needs to be removed from the mailing list and this parent's email address needs to be updated. Why do I know that?
I know that because they accidentally emailed all the parents, when they're actually trying to just let the principal know that the mailing list needs updating. So this is the constant struggle of teachers right now is just trying to There's all this fragmented data. We're really struggling to try and keep everything up to date. it's such a nightmare.
I don't know how many of the teachers manage it. not a fault of that teacher. It's just such a struggle. It's such, such an easy thing to do because yeah, there's all these different confusing mailing lists and things like that.
we get it and we'll maybe just, Just talk about some of those pain points. so today in terms of agenda, I'm going to talk about why communications, what, why we're looking at that right now from the point of view of ORA and school software. that's going to be our scorecard as we go through and have a look at some of the things that we've done. so we first did a version of this webinar back in, I think, February.
and since then we've released a, as my dad would say, we've leased a truckload of, new features. into, into Orah communications. And we want to share those with you, give you some quick demos of those, and then see, does that help? Does that kind of, solve some of these pain points?
We are far from done in this space. We know there's always more to be done, but we really want to zone in on the kind of the key pain points that we heard as we spoke to schools over the last little while. so why communications? Too many apps, lots of different tools, like mailing lists, email for this, WhatsApp for the other, Teams for internal conversations with staff, but you don't have students on Teams.
I know some of you have tried doing kind of Teams and Google Chat for that kind of thing, but it doesn't really work. And fragmented communications, messages going out in one channel, but not on another, all of that good stuff. Second, and probably one of the most important things that we've heard particularly around duty of care is important issues may not get surfaced, in two ways. one, important conversations may be getting are in the weeds and not surfacing from a school's point of view of being able to monitor, maybe students that are at risk, things like that, and also important issues may not get surfaced in terms of visibility of the conversations that other members of staff are having with the student, where you're trying to have a similar conversation as well.
Can I see, can I do we have a good insight as to exactly what's going on with, on a particular topic with a group or a student? and then thirdly, and this goes back to my example of the weekend, communications are not structured and organized. Organized in the same way schools are. Schools work in grades, classes, teacher assignments, all of those things.
Can you see those sorts of kind of ways to manage your communications and your existing communications tool? If not, then you're constantly chasing, the ability to to communicate with the right groups and you're manually creating, Groups of students, and that kind of stuff, and they go out of date, all of that good stuff. So those are the kind of the three, really strong pain points we heard as we did our research and worked with yourselves in the, in that. and so our focus is to make Communications, clear and simple.
Maybe what's missing for that, but SubLight is clear and simple for schools because this is all about specifically solving, communications, for schools. So I'm going to start with some of the more recent things that, that we've, released, which is, Conversations. Conversations is what we call, our two way chat capability, that, We released the initial version of, just, maybe two months ago. And most recently last week we released the, group conversations capability as well.
So I'm just going to head and jump in and show you a quick, demo of that. So conversations, we decided that the main use case for conversations was going to be your day to day stuff who are, In the home board, checking where students are, working on a daily basis. And we want to have sort of your students, your schedule, if you're using Orah for attendance, and your conversations all in a quick and easy, to access, area of the app. And here are all my, conversations that I've set up.
One thing to one thing that's a little bit tricky is replicating a whole school worth of conversations and connections, in my test again. So I've got the help of the whole Orah team. so this is our Orah. Or a demo account, which we use.
I've got my Chinese 1 group that I as a teacher have access to. And here's all the students that, that are in my group. I can remove, different students if I want to, but let me just start by creating a new conversation. and I'll just start, I'm going to do two different conversations.
The first I'm going to do is, I think it's time I had a chat with my grade five kids. I'm going to start a conversation. Because, don't forget your science project tomorrow. Awesome.
I'm going to rename this to my grade five students. Perfect. I've got my students. I also see here that, I've got one student who hasn't actually connected, Orah.
Oh, I didn't hit send, as well. So I've got two. Now I'm going to be jumping around a little bit here, but, I should be able to see my conversation. I'm just going to, bring in my tab.
Perfect. this is a lot of multitasking for me, but hopefully I'm managing okay. So you can see my generic student is replying. and I should have another student in here as well, which I will use.
So that's group conversations. You can have as many students as you want. I think I'm in a pretty large group of 49 here. Yep.
You can also add more students, to that group if you want. Super easy to do that. I'm not sure if Kurt, yeah, Kurt has a test student in here as well. Perfect.
We'll add Kurt to that group as well.
Kurt Meyer: and Ronan, can we add, classes and those sorts of groups as well?
Ronan Quirke: Yes, yeah, so this, this Chinese one was a class I added earlier, and I think I have another class I can add, which is my varsity, field hockey varsity girls. So this is, is an athletics group, but it works the same as classes as well. that's my hockey team. So that would be great to remind them about practice, and, I'm not sure I do have advanced biology, my biology classes as well here as well.
So I could create a group with my biology classes. as well. so those are groups. I also, as I mentioned, you can also kind of, create just, you can just find one particular student if you just want to have a conversation with that student, check in on those.
And they, As you can see on the right hand side, they have access to, this on the student app and also the student mobile app. And so I've got my two test students, generic student, and Dan here, replying to my messages. So that is Conversations. As I show you some extra, some other features, we'll see this time together a little bit more, but yeah, so conversations, the intention is just to keep it simple and to let you use any of the different ways that you can organize students as I mentioned, so you've got houses there.
You can actually find, you can create a group for a house. you can have a tag. So as I showed you earlier, I've got my grade five tag. you can find a specific student and yeah, you can find, your different class groupings as well.
So this is of course provided that you, you've got your integration connected to your school information system so we can pull in your class groupings. But if you do, then that's all available to you. So yeah, that is, conversations. Yep, as I said, the things that sort of to, that are important from a school use point of view is obviously making sure that your students do actually have an Orah account, set up.
so that's pretty key. Obviously, they're not going to get any replies. If you do, for example, though, want to add, so an entire class and 20 of the 22 do have accounts and two don't, that's fine. Just create them, add them.
And when they do actually create their account, eventually they'll have access to that group straight away as well. So that's all, all there for you as well. So pretty simple. So that is conversations.
And that, as I said, so the direct conversations, to individual students have been live for a little while, but just last week we've opened up group conversations as well, as we understand that's quite, important to you. So that is conversations. Switching to the next piece of the puzzle then is broadcasts. Many of you will already be familiar with broadcasts, so I'm just going to do a very quick overview of broadcasts.
These are within communications. Broadcasts, and I can see, I can create, a new broadcast for a group of students. for example, if I wanted to find my grade five students again, perfect. I've got my three students in grade five.
one student can be contacted and two cannot because they've got no email address. I can put in a message. and send that message. I can also send a, message or a broadcast with some response options.
For example, I want to make sure you're bringing your science projects. and yes or no. So Dan's already replied that she is. And these two students haven't replied yet, so then I can capture a simple response to a quick question that I need to be answered.
This is good when you're sending out something to a large group of students, you don't want a paragraph of explanation as to why they've forgotten their science project. You just want a clear answer to a question. You can add your broadcast responses and send that out. So those are broadcasts.
Bringing all that together, I'm just going to jump into the next piece of the puzzle, which is overview. So our overview, has, as it shows is very much just giving you a summary of all the communications. So this is your administrator's view of Orah communications that gives you an overview of all the communications that are happening. Might just switch to this view as well.
It's got a little bit more going on here. So I've got my different broadcasts. Got the number of staff, number of students, Obviously, if you're using communications, making sure that you can actually reach them, reach students, is super important through connected accounts, making sure you also have, SMS numbers and things like that as well. And so we've made sure to, give you an overview of what communications channels, email, push for the app.
and SMS, are actually available to you for the, for these students. And yes, you can see, all of that detail here. And you can also, you can also do this for student contacts and staff. and if you wanted to, for example, see if, find all the students which you don't have a mobile number for.
You can just add a filter and that will give you the list of that. you can also find obviously filters for different options as well, which, is not, so this will show everybody with an email address. Et cetera, et cetera. so it really helps you make sure that you're getting all your, your contact information up to date.
Hard to reach students. These are students that, are either not contactable or just not responding to your messages as well. Because again, it's one thing to send communications. but, Making sure that students are actually responding to them is quite important as well, so we're thinking this will be a useful insight into anywhere you need to drill into in terms of disengaged students and things like that as well.
We've also introduced a little bit of a leaderboard, where you can see which, staff members are doing the best, and the best here is quantified as, regularity, the communications that they're sending out, and also the response rate that they're getting for the communications as well. So that is a broadcast overview. So that overview just really helps you give you visualization, drill into, I guess what we're trying to help you here with is good communications discipline and making sure that you've got your data in a way that you can actually use communications effectively. So that is broadcasts and communications overview.
The. Next thing, which we goes back to what we talked about in student care is the ability to have a level of oversight and monitor of the, of the broadcast, so the communications that are happening, within your school as well. And within communications, you also have a monitor, view. Important to remember that there are different access permissions for some of these features and also, I should have mentioned earlier, for both conversations and broadcasts you can limit staff to only have access to communicate with specific groups of students.
For example, you only want your teaching staff to be able to send broadcasts to the students of the classes in which they are assigned and then you could limit that way so you don't have to worry about Somebody like me accidentally sending, messages to the entire school rather than just biology class. the communications monitor, essentially, if you have this, admin privilege, it lets you have access to any communications that are taking place, within the school. and so you can say, for example, if I want you, if I was a little bit worried about what, how Dan is doing, these are all the.
Conversations that this particular student is involved in, grade five one, they're in an old school chat, class five and class six chats, and this chat as well. from an admin point of view, you're not participating in this conversation. But, it gives you from a school point of view the ability to, just check in and see if the, if you have any concerns about a particular, student that you can, you can access the conversation. You can also just obviously just go through, And just keep an eye on conversations.
I'm guessing that, if you're a relatively large school, this will be pretty busy, but it does give you that ability to just dip in if that's something that you might want to do, maybe run an audit every couple of weeks. but as I said, the main use case right now is just, finding a particular student if there's any concerns there and you want to, check into how they're doing, If there's maybe some tone that's off in terms of conversations, or there's maybe, yeah, there's a complaint about some interactions. And this is a, there's a quick way to jump in there. there's probably a lot more we could do here, but we thought that giving you something that kind of, Just gives you access to, just a general taste of what we can do in Conversation Monitor.
There's lots of exciting things I have in terms of ideas about how we could progress this in future. but we felt that the main thing to do is get you up and running with conversations, broadcasts, get those going within your school and then seeing what sort of, what new insights and reports you would like to see as a result of that.
Kurt Meyer: I wonder if it's worth, talking to the permissions around giving submembers access to monitor.
Ronan Quirke: Yes. Yeah, that's a good idea, Kurt. So I'll just go ahead and jump into this account. And although I'm not practicing what I preach here, I normally tell everybody to use user roles, but here I am using additional permissions instead, so forgive me.
but, so here we've got the communications permissions. as I said, within this panel here, you can assign a specific student access. For example, I'm only allowed to see, I'll just for example's sake, I'll just say, I can only communicate with grade five students. So if that was set like that, then I'll be able to send broadcasts and have conversations with only grade five students.
there is also this, button here, which is unchecked by default, as you would expect for a communications monitor. and the, checking this and applying it to either a user role or a staff, additional permission will give them access to that communications, monitor, capability. We've kept the. Permissions, pretty straightforward for communications and already I think there's been a little bit of feedback that even limiting, the assigned students within communications, Might cause, some problems because you then find, I'm certainly finding as I'm running through tests.
Oh, I really want to be able to communicate with this student here, even if they're not in my class. So I guess I think for broadcasts, I think that sort of having some limitations is a good idea. But, overly restrictive, assignments in terms of who can contact who for a communications tool. Yeah, it's something to think about as to how you want to manage that.
I think it's quite different to, for example, our wellbeing product, where you want to have quite very limited access to the wellbeing records of students versus, communications, but something to discuss. With us, if, if you've got any questions about how you want to set up your permissions for communications in particular. Yeah, so that is communications monitor now. I should have done this a little bit differently, but I just want to go back and kind of Recap on our pain points and look at what we've built.
So what, why communications, too many apps, lots of different tools, fragmented communications. So what our solution here is that, if you're going to be using Orah for, a whole bunch of, Your day to day operations anyway, then bringing communications in alongside attendance and well being made a lot of sense for a lot of schools. you've got your user account set up, you've got SSO in many cases and that kind of stuff. So it's very simple and straightforward to just open up access to that, as a channel and just bring them in rather than having separate, separate apps for that specific purpose.
Important issues may not get surfaced. Here we focused on, bug communications monitor and also the overview capability so that, admins and, and other accessor given those permissions can, And I suppose ensure that things aren't getting missed and also you have visibility of things and it's not by exception or by when something actually becomes a complaint or a problem that you find out about this that you have the ability to, to audit or check or whatever you need to do to actually ensure that you're comfortable with how things are happening in terms of your school. And then The third one, communications not structured and organized in the same way schools are.
so we've bringing in, your tags, your houses and your, SIS groups. Um, so yeah, and just on that, I see Rochelle has a question, about community groups. Hey Rochelle, nice. Oh, not.
Quite talking to you, but nice to get a question from you anyway. Hopefully we'll chat soon. community groups, as I understand it, they're they're an extra group of contacts essentially. So you've got your students and the contacts of the students and community groups are another one again.
it hasn't, really Come up as a, as part of our data model so far. but yeah, I think I can see how. As we give you the communications tool that you would want to do that. yeah.
But, it's not really in our plan at the moment, is occurred, but definitely, I suppose keen to have, look at community groups and how they work a bit more.
Kurt Meyer: yeah. oh,
Ronan Quirke: she's, sorry, Michelle. Yeah. I like other groups in Blackboard such as activities, classes, advisories and teams. Yes.
Oh,
Kurt Meyer: interesting.
Ronan Quirke: So if it's another group type, then that should be easy to bring in. I thought that would be with different sorts of people than the existing students and contacts. But if it's, if it's just another type of group, then, it should be relatively straightforward for us to add that in. I know that's what we've done for their integrations, adding in additional group types.
If they work like athletics or advisories or teams, then it should be straightforward. It's pretty straightforward to do that, so I'll, jump on the, the Blackboard API documentation, Rochelle, and see what I can find out. Thank you for that.
Kurt Meyer: Thanks, Rochelle.
Ronan Quirke: Awesome. So that is, communications. I think one of the questions we're getting, so far in terms of communications is, how can we give it a try? and this pretty well, either email myself or email your, your customer success contact, and we can definitely set you up with a trial.
I think there's a couple of. ways you could do that. I think probably, if I was trialing it mid academic year, I might pick a couple of classes and a couple of teachers that you are know as your early adopters and just roll that out and get some feedback, from them. if you're, in, Northern Hemisphere in the UK or the US, you're coming up to the start of your academic year.
yeah, it might be something that you feel is actually quite easy to bolt on. As I said, it is already in Orah. It's quite straightforward to use. Everybody's been using messaging apps these days.
We're not doing anything crazy different. We're just bringing it into Orah. yeah, it shouldn't be a stretch. I think the main thing to consider is how you want to manage that communications in terms of rolling it out.
And, What communications you want to have in Orah, and just making sure that you've got a policy or a plan around how you want to do that and roll that out. so certainly if you're an existing Orah customer, it's very easy for us to, give you access and set that up. It's more a consideration about what's the best way for you to get started with that. Um, thank you so much.
if you've got any last minute questions or if you've got a, if you think of a question just at the, just after this, then feel free to email myself. yeah, we've delivered, as I said, an awful lot of capability As usual, based on your feedback, but we know we've got lots more to do, so don't be shy about telling me what else you'd like to see in terms of communications. We know there's so much more we would love to do, but really right now we've built out the core capabilities that we know you needed to, to be using or communications to start with. And so really looking forward to seeing how you're using it and then getting more feedback and building from there.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome.
Ronan Quirke: thank you, everybody. And, yeah, we'll look forward to seeing you at our next webinar.
Kurt Meyer: Great. Thanks, Ronan. Thanks, everyone.
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