Case Study: Learning Circle

Learning Circle is a novel interactive software solution designed to help educators manage, interpret, and communicate academic data.

Data-Driven Decision-Making for Educators

There's a difference between educating children and providing the education children need.

To be most successful and efficient, educators need the ability to tailor their methods of instruction to meet the needs of individual students; creating, in effect, a customized learning experience for each child. The key to reaching this goal lies in how schools use their academic data.

Educators must be able to convert raw academic data into information they can use to gauge student achievement and measure progress. Within a school district, however, data may be distributed throughout many different systems and in many different formats. Integrating the data, transforming it into useful information, and getting it to those who can use it – quickly and in a format they can use – can be labor intensive and time consuming.

The solution? Learning Circle^SM

What is Learning Circle?

Learning Circle is a role-based, interactive software solution that enables educators, administrators, and executives to manage, analyze, interpret, and communicate academic data efficiently and effectively. Learning Circle improves the ability of educators to make data-driven decisions, set goals based on performance and selected intervention strategies, and then achieve those goals.

Benefits

Learning Circle couples academic, disciplinary, attendance, and other data with the analytical tools needed to interpret that data to create a one-stop shop for collecting, organizing, integrating, and sharing data. Learning Circle helps educators, administrators, and executives:

• Perform summative and formative data analysis
• Visualize longitudinal trends and perform needs assessments
• Align priorities and strategies
• Streamline the school improvement plan development and approval process
• Automate state and federal compliance reporting

Web Platform

Learning Circle is powered by the industry-leading WebFOCUS enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform from Information Builders, and integration solutions from iWay Software – a division of Information Builders. Using WebFOCUS and iWay, Learning Circle easily integrates multiple sources of data, in varying formats, and presents it via secure reports that teachers, administrators, and executives can access, understand, and manipulate quickly and easily. Learning Circle is a customizable, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solution that can be integrated with virtually any application. It can be deployed as a hosted solution in a software as a service (SaaS) model, or within your organization's computing environment.

Dashboards and Role-Based Navigation

Learning Circle's role-based dashboards provide an intuitive navigation system that enables users to find and absorb information efficiently through a Web interface. Each interactive dashboard is tailored to the specific needs of the users in that category, providing them with the ability to identify opportunities for improvement by drilling down to lower levels of granularity (e.g., from state, region, district, school, grade, classroom, and even down to individual students).

Role-Based Dashboards

Trend Reports

Parameterized Reports

Core Process

Learning Circle supports a strategic planning process that begins with an assessment of the current academic status of schools, classrooms, and students using available achievement data. Current data is retrieved from various databases, analyzed in accordance with appropriate state and federal compliance standards, and then displayed in report form.

Learning Circle's reports reveal and highlight any trends that may be occurring within a given school system, an individual school, or at a particular grade level and provide insight into the type of assistance each school and student needs. Educators can make observations based on district, school, grade, classroom, and student performance; drill down into the data to see more details; and visually assess needs, deficiencies, and challenges using Learning Circle's interactive charts and graphs.

Once users identify specific improvement needs, they can select from a library of evidence-based strategies and learning tools to address each need or challenge. Developed by The Ohio State University with support from the Nationwide Insurance Foundation, the strategies represent techniques and best practices that can be used in classroom interventions to effect positive change. Based on the observations educators enter about each improvement need, Learning Circle narrows the list of selectable strategies, presenting a short list of strategies that most directly target the need identified. Educators then select strategies from this hand-picked listing.

Student Data Observations

Goals and Strategies

Evidence-Based Strategies

Using the data observations and associated strategies entered into Learning Circle, educators develop formal goals for their schools and complete each section of the school improvement plan. Learning Circle consolidates and packages these components, publishing a complete improvement plan for the school that can be reviewed online.

Learning Circle's longitudinal data framework enables educators to monitor the progress of their students and schools throughout the year to determine whether the selected strategies have improved academic performance. When new achievement scores populate the system, educators can tailor their strategies and lesson plans further to meet the evolving needs of their students.

Learning Circle is a service mark of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. 2010 Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. Patent Pending.