Build vs. Buy

To understand the learning patterns and make your institute truly data-driven, you need to have complete visibility over your classroom performance and its data. A well-designed class engagement solution makes it available in one place. In the academic world, this foundation enables you to make strategic decisions about which students need some hand-holding, which topics need to be revisited, or which cohort needs to be restructured.

Before answering these questions, one of the main difficulties for larger organizations is determining whether they should build this infrastructure themselves or invest in a prebuilt, automated solution.

How hard can it be?

Here are some of the fundamental questions that need to be answered before considering a project of this scale:

• What all forms of engagement would you design for?

• How will the data be collected, stored, and analyzed?

• How can we scale this solution to support new engagement forms and methods for diverse courses and students?

• What forms of triggers will you design for anomaly detection? 

• What resources are needed to create and maintain this infrastructure?

You’ll also need to consider the security risks and the ongoing complexity of real-time systems at scale.

Once these questions have been answered and the classes are engaging smartly while processing data in the correct form, you’ll need to make sense of it before analyzing your performance. This means automating the following aspects using a developer and/or man-hours if you intend to do this manually:

• Data normalization

• Data grouping

• Calculated metrics

• Data enrichment

• Report building

• Alerts on pattern detection

You also need to understand how individuals want to access and view the data vary depending on their role.

Teachers may wish to analyze the last few lectures to customize the following lecture, whereas the Content Team may need to look at how their prepared content is getting received overall through all batches. 

The Program Manager may need to look at individual students to validate their feedback on class performance. The Learning Excellence team would want to identify students to extend attention proactively.
A data analyst may prefer to have the data delivered to them in a raw form to process in existing pipelines.

It's important to ensure that all of these needs are met and that the data is accessible, approachable, and usable across the organization.

As you scale up, it would be necessary for businesses to deploy more automated touchpoints and triggers. You would also need to identify when, how, and to whom you want to send automated triggers and make it configurable for every batch.  

Build vs. Buy

The underlying question is where do you want to invest your time and internal resources; creating and maintaining internal tools or creating business value?

We’ve put together a brief comparison table worth considering before deciding:

Why investing in a prebuilt solution is beneficial?

Building an in-house class engagement and intelligence is usually more complex than most companies imagine. Automated solutions like Vidya.us can deliver a scalable and cost-efficient solution without compromising flexibility or control.

The benefits include

• Custom-built Classroom Intelligence Dashboard that addresses your team’s requirements.

• A robust engagement tool that can scale up and keeps releasing new ways of classroom engagements.

• Out-of-the-box integrations to Apps and LMS.

• Collaborative question banks help you standardize class engagement for all courses across the board.

• Standardized onboarding and training to get all educators on board with the proper product know-how, best practices, do’s and don’ts, and SOPs.   

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of choosing a prebuilt solution, feel free to reach out to us at happy@vidya.us.

Regardless of whether you end up building or buying a solution, try to ensure that all of these fundamental questions have been asked and answered to ensure that you're set up for success.