Clickedu uses Amazon QuickSight Embedded to empower school administrators with key educational institution health insights

This is a guest post by Ignasi Nogués and Georgina Valls from Clickedu.

With more than 1.5 million unique users across 700 schools and core values that include connectivity, reliability, and innovation, Clickedu is the leading educational platform in Spain. Offering both a school administration system and a digital learning environment, Clickedu is one of the most comprehensive education tools in the European market for K–12 schools. Founded in 2000, Clickedu was acquired by Finland-based Sanoma Learning Group, a leading European learning and media company, in 2019. In this post, we discuss why Clickedu chose QuickSight and will cover some of the post-implementation outcomes.

Having originally started as an IT company, Clickedu has always been focused on providing products and services designed specifically for the education sector. Through continuous partnership with school administrators and education professionals, our development process is firmly rooted in listening to feedback and making prioritization decisions based on what customers tell us is most important to them. Because schools are the central focus of our research and development efforts, our service and product quality standards remain high.

Our mission is to help schools invest their time in educational objectives, with as little time as possible dedicated to bureaucratic tasks. To help administrators in human resources (HR), finance, and academic departments make more strategic, data-driven decisions across networks of educational centers, we launched Clickedu Analytics. This product provides data analysis and presents insights in easy-to-understand dashboards with insightful visualizations. When researching business intelligence (BI) tools that would meet our needs for what we wanted Clickedu Analytics to do, we needed look no further than Amazon QuickSight.

Connecting the dots with data

Clickedu provides a cloud-based school platform that includes academic, administrative, and economic management tools and a virtual learning management system (LMS) with a connection to digital books and free content. For administrators, Clickedu’s software provides an interface to manage teachers, tutors, and heads of studies, as well as a communication environment for messaging families.

With so many data points spanning the full scope of the platform’s centralized capabilities across HR, finance, and academics, the untapped potential in that data presented a huge opportunity. We set out with the goal of building a BI experience that would enable us to quickly and efficiently analyze that data, visualize the results, and use those insights to better serve our customers.

The following screenshot shows a dashboard visualization of student distribution based on several different factors.

With dashboards built specifically to surface helpful information, school administrators are better able to make informed decisions based on clear, easy-to-understand insights. Reports can be generated to show academic results, pre-registrations, absences, etc., and all of it can be filtered by school year, institution, center, stage, courses, and classes.

Thanks to the information QuickSight delivers via Clickedu Analytics, our HR teams can see how many teachers in a group are likely to retire soon, or academic teams can see how language qualifications are progressing. Having fast, easy access to key insights like these help us be more proactive in identifying areas that might need attention before they become issues that demand a reaction.

Visibility to spot trends

The biggest challenge our customers were facing was a lack of visibility into aggregate data points that impacted several schools within a group. Speed, agility, and responsiveness are crucial when it comes to spotting trends in data points that signal issues in need of attention or wins deserving of celebration. Prior to implementing QuickSight, it would take time and resources to research whether something identified at one school was also showing up in the data points for the others. Now, administrators have full visibility to all relevant data across an entire network of schools with just a few clicks on their Clickedu Analytics dashboards.

Simple, serverless, scalable

After reviewing several other BI vendor products and evaluating the pros and cons of each, Amazon QuickSight was chosen as our Clickedu Analytics BI tool for these reasons.

• Simple integration – We use Amazon Redshift as our data warehouse. We also work with AWS Glue as an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool and Amazon SageMaker as a development environment. Adding Quicksight to our established mix of AWS services was a fast, simple, seamless process.
• Serverless – Because our AWS services are in the cloud, we don’t have to download or maintain any software; there’s no heavy lifting on our end.
• Scalable – QuickSight automatically scales resources based on usage and consumption, which takes one more task off the list of things we’d otherwise need to monitor and adjust.
• User-friendly – QuickSight’s intuitive interface means anyone can access insights, regardless of their tech background or aptitude.
• Embeddability – Being able to embed QuickSight directly into our existing product interfaces has enabled us to create valuable data products that allow both Clickedu and our customers to create visualizations of economic, academic, and HR data in an aggregate model.

Being able to export reports into PDFs, add new datasets, and the ease of combining with third-party data all contributed to swaying our decision to QuickSight.

Coming soon to Clickedu Analytics

QuickSight has empowered us to bring our Clickedu Analytics platform to the next level in providing the visibility and scalability we need to best serve our customers. We’re very excited to continue to iterate on what we’ve built with plans to expand access from the school groups and institutions who are currently using Clickedu Analytics to have it available to all schools that are in need of data management solutions.

Looking to the future, we see potential to do more with QuickSight in the learning management system (LMS) space. We are considering Amazon QuickSight Q, a machine learning-powered natural language capability that gives anyone in an organization the ability to ask business questions in natural language and receive accurate answers with relevant visualizations instantly without needing to go back to the dashboard author. There is ample potential to implement QuickSight Q as a means of querying and receiving information on our digital content.

To learn more about how you can embed customized data visuals, interactive dashboards, and natural language querying into any application, visit Amazon QuickSight Embedded.

To learn more about Clickedu, Spain’s leading platform for school administration, visit www.clickedu.net.

About the Authors

Ignasi Nogués is the founder and the CTO of Clickedu. He is, by definition, a big entrepreneur and a dreamer. He drove the company since 2000 to success due to hard work. He always wants to take the next step.

Georgina Valls is the Marketing Manager of Clickedu. She is a hardworker, dedicated to letting others know about Clickedu and its capabilities. As the daughter of teachers, she is very passionate about creating a brighter future in education.