Challenge:
Educators at this private school struggled to access student data spread across ten different systems, forcing them to spend time wrangling data instead of teaching.

Solution:
Penola Catholic College uses Education360, which is powered by Domo, to bring all its student data together in one dashboard. 

Impact:
Instructors can now analyze student performance at the class level or by individual students, allowing them to tailor their instruction.

Penola Catholic School improves its student insight with Domo.

Penola Catholic College is a co-educational secondary school that serves approximately 1,500 students in Years 7-12 across two campuses in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. The school attracts students from diverse socioeconomic and educational backgrounds throughout the city, while almost half come from families that speak another language than English. 

With such a wide-ranging student population, the administrators and teachers at Penola Catholic College know that a one-size-fits-all approach to education would result in students falling through the gaps. Instead, they rely on data powered by Domo to deliver a customized educational approach for each student so every learner can reach their full potential.  

Holistic student understanding.

Before Domo, educators at Penola Catholic College often struggled to leverage all the student data at their disposal. “We had data in 10 different places, forcing staff to go to 10 different locations to find out everything they needed to know about their students. It was too much to expect,” said Anthony Austin, IT Manager at Penola Catholic College.  

Not only was data difficult and time-consuming for educators to collect, but they had no way to easily synthesize it in a way that could produce meaningful insights. Without the ability to visualize data and put it in context, educators couldn’t quickly determine which step to take next, which meant at-risk students would fall further behind before they got the help they needed.  

In order to leverage data to its full potential, Penola Catholic College worked with 9×5 Consulting to incorporate their Education360 analytics platform, which is powered by Domo.

“The reason why we built Education360 on Domo is that education institutions have some very specific challenges we wanted to address,” said Matthew Willie, CEO at 9×5 Consulting. “We need to incorporate both on-premise and cloud-based data. We need to make it very, very easy for staff to utilize the data. We wanted the ability to annotate within the data itself. And we wanted a project management tool to be incorporated so that staff members could hold themselves and students accountable.” 

“The biggest benefit of Education360 is that it reduces the time that staff must spend collecting data. We are giving hours back to the teachers,” Willie said. 

Empowering informed decisions. 

Thanks to Domo and the Education360 platform, Penola Catholic College is able to bring all of its student data together in one dashboard for instant, real-time access. “Their scores, assessments, attendance data, pastoral care data, and more are all there. A teacher can see it as a class summary, or drill down to one student at a time if they wish,” Austin said. 

The Education360 platform collects data from four internal data locations and six external data locations, with data coming everywhere from the school’s student management system to spreadsheets capturing national testing data. It then visualizes the data so instructors can see student progress at a glance and quickly identify areas for action.  

“The biggest benefit I get as a principal is that I now have the data I need to make better decisions about what’s required for the school overall,” said Chris Caldow, Principal of Penola Catholic College. “From the teaching perspective, instructors now have a complete understanding about each student and at what level they’re currently working at.”

Teachers use the platform to differentiate the instruction they deliver on a student-by-student basis. For example, an instructor might look at recent scores on an algebra unit to see if there are specific elements that students are struggling with that they might need to review with the class as a whole, or with specific students who need more help. “The data helps us ensure there is not a gaping difference in student achievement in any specific area,” Treloar said.   

In addition to tracking academic achievement, Caldow said that the Education360 platform and Domo have allowed the school to gain new insights into their students so they can identify potential issues sooner. “If we see a student that has been performing really well but has a sudden drop off in grades or attendance, this indicates that there’s something going on in their life that we may not necessarily be aware of, which allows us to investigate and work with the student and their family to get it resolved.”