We’re excited to share that our team recently authored a guest article for the AWS Business Intelligence Blog! In the piece, we highlight how Mindex partnered with Amazon QuickSight to enhance performance and user experience—bringing advanced analytics to over 410 New York State school districts through the SchoolTool platform.
Mindex is a leading provider of enterprise software development and cloud services. One of Mindex’s products is SchoolTool, a student management system for the New York State school district. SchoolTool’s advanced analytics platform offers various dashboards allowing administrators to unlock invaluable data insights for districts and drive systematic improvements in student outcomes.
At Mindex, we believe education technology should empower educators and students, not overwhelm them with complexity. Our SchoolTool platform aims to put data-driven insights directly into the hands of teachers, administrators, and learners through intuitive, visual analytics powered by Amazon QuickSight.
In today’s data-rich educational environments, the ability to glean actionable insights shouldn’t be limited to technical analysts. By embedding QuickSight dashboards and visualizations directly within SchoolTool, we are democratizing advanced analytics capabilities. Now, non-technical users can easily explore up-to-date data from across their academic ecosystem, spotting important trends and making informed decisions, all without needing to learn complex business intelligence (BI) tools.
Our goal is to facilitate better student outcomes by surfacing key metrics and patterns using intuitive, interactive dashboards and natural language queries. With SchoolTool’s seamless integration of QuickSight, teachers can get guidance on intervention strategies tailored to each student’s needs. Administrators gain visibility into program effectiveness across the institution. And parents can easily monitor their children’s progress through the Parent Portal App.
In this post, we’ll share how Mindex partnered with QuickSight to enhance speed and experience and offer advanced analytics to more than 410 school districts through the SchoolTool Platform. We’ll explore how Mindex used QuickSight to build efficient dashboards and used Amazon Q in QuickSight, harnessing the power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to make dashboard developers more efficient.
Before adopting QuickSight, Mindex faced significant technical challenges with our previous business intelligence platform. Our home-grown solution, built using a mix of .NET and various libraries, was labor-intensive and cumbersome. Developing and deploying dashboards required substantial effort, and the platform didn’t allow customers to create and share their own dashboards. Instead, customers could only access pre-created dashboards, limiting their ability to use data fully.
Mindex chose QuickSight for several compelling reasons:
At Mindex, we’re continually striving to innovate and improve SchoolTool’s usability for the entire education community. We recognize that not everyone has data analysis expertise.
Using QuickSight, we built effective and intuitive dashboards that transformed how users interact with data. These dashboards provide a comprehensive view of key metrics and trends enabling users to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
One notable example is the SchoolTool’s Absenteeism dashboard, inspired by our early warning system but primarily focused on absenteeism. The core of this dashboard revolves around three risk levels aligned with the New York state standard for chronic absenteeism. As shown in the following figure, at the top of the dashboard are four main demographic categories, which can be filtered to focus on specific demographics of interest. Users can narrow down the dashboard to students with 20% or more absenteeism or select specific graphics to filter the information, making it more accessible for those who prefer visual navigation.
Building on this foundation, we deployed Amazon Q in QuickSight to further democratize data access within SchoolTool. Q uses generative AI capabilities to understand natural language questions and their relation to the underlying data. This allows users to ask questions and get visualized insights within seconds, instead of filtering through dashboards.
For customers, this generative Q&A capability of Amazon Q in QuickSight enables them to get answers to questions such as “What are the rates of absentees by economic status” and provide the most relevant multi-visual response along with suggested questions for the best user experience.
The following figure shows the Amazon Q in QuickSight experience in our dashboards today.
The deployment of QuickSight has significantly accelerated our ability to bring analytics to market, offering a remarkable 300% increase in speed to market.