How K-12 Data Can Help Students Succeed Academically\

In this episode, host Zeshan Randhawa sits down with Soufiane Ben Moussa, Deputy Director of Technology at Conseil des Ecoles Catholique du Centre-Est (CECCE) to discuss the role of data analytics for K12 organizations and how CECCE has been leveraging data to help students succeed in their education. Together, they dive into the various ways data can be used to identify student needs, tailor educational approaches, and improve overall academic outcomes. They also explore the challenges and opportunities of adopting data-driven strategies in schools and offer practical insights for educators and administrators seeking to use data effectively to support student achievement.

Transcript

You’re listening to the Cloud Lounge podcast, a show about business technology and all that jazz brought to you by Softlanding a leading it service provider in Canada. Let’s get started. Here’s your host, Zeshan Randhawa. Welcome to the Cloud Lounge podcast. I’m your host, Zeshan. Well, it’s been a few weeks since schools have reopened and we couldn’t think of a more fitting time to talk about how technology and data can help students succeed academically. K to 12 schools and districts are not unlike traditional organizations. Whereas data can be found everywhere. We’re talking about student records, grade books, budget, documents, survey results. And the list goes on this information and data is critical for evaluating programs, establishing funding and generally monitoring changes over time. And despite having access to a wealth of data, K to 12 districts often lack the necessary resources to consistently analyze and utilize that data in a systematic and ongoing manner. And as the quote by Peter Drucker, one of the great management, influential thinkers of our time goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure, measuring the students progress throughout their academic career is an important part of ensuring their long term academic success and to discuss the role of data in the K to 12 education space. I’m happy to welcome our guest work today and to talk about our topic today, we have Soufiane Ben Moussa, Deputy Director of Technology at Conseil des Ecoles Catholique du Centre-Est de l’Ontario. Welcome to the podcast, Soufiane. Thank you. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to share with you. So, Soufiane, can we start off by you just telling us a bit about your organization and its mission in the K to 12 education space? Yes, of course. The CECCE is a school council K 12 composed of about 62 schools I say about because it’s growing, there’s a couple of new schools opening 30,000 students from grade one to grade 12, established for the last 15 to 20 years, spreading from far east of Ottawa past Orleans up to Kingston in Ontario. That’s about 220 kilometers. We are practically in every area where there is French speaking people interested in our programs. Excellent, excellent and Soufiane for your students, what are some of the diverse needs for your students? And how does your organization actually address these needs? Well, we are not different from any school board or this education tuition public nature. Then, we cater to a whole diversity of Canadian from ethnicities, new immigrant people with special needs, various types of special needs. I think we have all of them with 30,000 students you can understand that this is a good sample of the Ontario population that we are serving. Then we have the whole spectrum of every type and needs of students. You can have a very good sample size like you said across the board. And I understand the CECCE has a bit of a history with data analytics as a part of your educational strategy. Where and how did this actually start? Well, way before my time and I’m just catching up to see what what happened before. But even way before the word data analytics may be being used in the it, the school board was very, very interested to analyze the success of the student, the success of their programs, the success of the teacher in the class of our infrastructure. Collaborating. There is a huge mind of collaboration in our school board and sharing with other school board or interested organization either sponsored or not sponsored by the Ontario government who have the same interest, which is the success of our students. That’s the primary goal of whatever we do from an analytics perspective, we do have also a very strong principles and they are reflected in our strategic plan and strategic vision that there is no kids left behind. And that’s we mean it it’s not like a slogan or just a phrase really. I see it on a daily basis at every level in the institution where every student have the right attention which is a very good thing for us. But at the same time, it is very demanding as a mission. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, Dal analytics is potentially kind of your tool to enforce that vision of no child left behind. Yes, there is tons of data collected and reports presented. And I would say the majority of the decision that the school board takes are based on real facts. Excellent, excellent. And now Soufiane, I know you recently went through a major data analytics transformation. Even though you’ve been doing data analytics at CECCE for a while. Can you tell us about this latest journey or project that you undertook? Yeah, of course, which with my starting in the school board, I came from another career to the school board. It happened that two years ago, the Ontario Ministry of Education have selected new student management platform, that platform have replaced our cornerstone of the old platform. Then there is a lot of tools and reports and processes that needed to be rethought and a lot of investments that have been made through the years have to be redone because the sources have changed. At the same time, there is a big desire to bring artificial intelligence into the equation and I can speak later more about why and what’s the goal of that? And that’s what led me to work with the team and come with a new architecture where it’s much more based on open data platform and open analytics platform that will allow us to invest on it. But at the same time, it will allow us to also reuse other investment of other institutions that they have made on this open platform. And that’s really a vision that we adopted. We selected this open platform, it’s called Open education Analytics sponsored by many industry leaders chief. Among them, Microsoft is investing on it. Also, we use it as a fast track to take the data from the new student analytical system and bring it to a place where the various stakeholders can run analytics projects. But at the same time, it was our first step towards enabling our Artificial Intelligence project. Yeah, let’s get into that A I piece now that you’re kind of this environment is enhanced with the AI. What kind of behaviors or patterns were you able to discover which you weren’t previously or that you’re starting to discover now? Yeah, I like the word starting to discover because this is a journey. I don’t think that is something that you download and install and you have AI it has a lot of dynamics around it and everything. But the main goal, all the analytics that has been done in the past is to learn from the past and prepare for the future and that was good. But unfortunately, the harm is already done to that kid that we missed in the past, of course, that we are going to use the failure of the kids to avoid failure like that in the future. What we wish that the A I bring to us is the ability to detect early detection of kids who need help, that we should do something before they fail. Then literally avoiding the failure of those we missed from the traditional method and tools that we have. And that’s really the essence. Of course AI now became also everywhere only present. We are using A I in other dimensions, cybersecurity. We are using AI for helping teachers bring them the best content possible, creating content. We are also planning to use A I to have a tutor for those kids who need help after hours and they have a question trying to solve a problem then that’s what we are investing on it. But all of it started from that data analytics project because when you do that, you create the culture, you create the curiosity, you create the processes and you start enabling the organization. Absolutely. Absolutely. Soufiane, I I know it’s, it’s kind of early in your this new journey for you folks, especially with enhanced AI and your data analytics platform and so on. But I’d love to hear from you what this project or transformation has meant for students and educators. Have you seen any change yet? Is there anything you’re anticipating? How is their landscape kind of changed? I think it’s a little bit early to give you a concrete response for this mainly because we are trying to be very safe. We spend a lot of time to protect the student, to protect the data of the student, to give the right ethical approach to the teacher and all that stuff. Then while the technology is there, it’s going to take a couple of iterations before I would be able to answer you properly. Concretely if we, the what we wish that the, the, the e tutor or the digital tutor will offer to the student is the ability to help them after hour, I don’t have metrics yet to share with you. Maybe next year I will be in a better position. Absolutely. Absolutely. But a very good point that you make there as well of not just kind of dumping the technology into the environment, but actually doing your due diligence and doing your kind of governance and ethics work and planning ahead of time as well. So that’s really important, I think for people to hear as well and Soufiane, what other lessons have you learned or in general? What lessons have you learned that other K to 12 organizations might find useful in, in this kind of recent journey of yours. I think two lessons learned, maybe not, but they are very important for and very maybe new to educational institutions. First, the importance of information management with all the dimension of the life cycle of information that is essential because if there is no quality information, if there is no available information, there is no intelligent information is not artificial intelligence. I always say it is intelligent data, how to make the data more intelligent. Then if you don’t have that data, there is no possible success. Garbage in garbage out. Right. Yes. And if you don’t manage it properly, your investment to adopt AI or analytic will be huge and redundant. The second one which are very related is the governance. There is a lot of hide, there is a lot of stories, there is a lot of things you can download, there is a lot of people selling things. Then if you don’t have a good governance around, what are the choices? Which one are we going to do? Why we are investing here? What is our metrics? What is our success criteria and to have the different leader participating in this governance and deciding, making the right choice. If you don’t have that, if you don’t have the right preference, you can fall into an abundance of initiative that they would never see the, the day or the success that you are or, or you put your organization at risk. Absolutely. Absolutely. Some very wise words for sure. So, Soufiane, how do you see the role of data analytics and AI evolving in the K to 12 education kind of sector over the next few years? What’s your finger on the pulse? I think it’s gonna be a huge game changer. I think we know it, we know this is a concrete fact that the Ministry also of Educational Ontario is supporting and pushing towards this vision. I compare this to we speak analytics. But there is a lot of a I told today and I will say this is very similar to year 2000 when the web became a mainstream thing. And the question is a question of survival. Do you have a website or you don’t have a website? And then we went through a very cycle of maturity in terms of what the website needs. And today we are speaking about accessibility and all those and open web and web 3.0 and all that stuff. I think this is happening to the A I and the data analytics. I think the teacher of the future will rely much more on data than today. When I said our board used data analytics, it’s used at the superintendent level at director level, which influence policy guidelines less at the teacher level. And what I predict that these tools will become a main tool for the teacher. Parents are not interested, more and more demanding, more customizable curriculum. Kids are different. There’s a lot of research about it. The success of one way is not the same for the other kids. Then you can imagine the future a teacher who have 20 students, 20 kids in a class and using AI analytics, he can tailor the program for every kid, the expectation the based on facts based on behavior based on not only grades but many other facts. Then that’s what I think. I think this is a game changer and people need to start investing on it. Yeah. And now again, we already pointed out you’re kind of really early on in your journey with this kind of A I integration into your DNA analytics platform. And you already alluded to a few kind of things that you’re thinking of working on, like the the A I tutor and so on and so forth. But if you take a look at your magical crystal ball in your eyes, kind of what is in the future for CECCE with your new AI enabled that data analytics platform. Do you have any kind of future, any additional future applications or ideas that you’re working on or envisioning our school board? It’s a very, I don’t know all the other school board, but I know that the time I’ve been in school and I studied in many other countries personally. And I find that the dynamic of our school board is very aggressive on finding means and ways to modernize and evolve the students and bring our students to the highest level of education while maintaining that philosophy that no one is left behind. Then what I see, as I said, more tools to help the student and more tools to help the teacher to make the teacher more available to the student, to make the teacher spend more time with the student and less time doing the mechanical stuff that they use to do. This. A I will never replace, I don’t foresee personally, at least in our life that this will replace a teacher. This is an enabler, a tool to evolve the teacher to give some other means for the teacher to have more time with the students. Well, Soufiane, I’d like to thank you so much for spending your time and kind of enlightening us with your journey and the journey of CECCE. Thank you so much for joining us at the Cloud Lounge podcast. It’s an interesting thought. A data point can represent the child’s potential or at least help shape their academic future when technology can directly or even indirectly assist with shaping our future or the next generation. It can remind us of why we’re in this industry. I know it does. For me, we are seeing a time where these type of innovative technology solutions assist educators, administrators and policy makers to focus on what matters the most, which is, of course the student. I’d like to thank Soufiane for joining us today in our conversation and sharing his data journey. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time this has been the Cloud Lounge podcast. Take care.

 

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