Join Nick Honegger and Abbie Currier as they give a general overview of Enflux, while diving into challenges users commonly solve via the Enflux platform.
Nick: Hi everyone. This is Nick Honegger the Head of Marketing here at Enflux and today, I’m with Abbie Currier our Head of Customer Success and we have been getting a lot of questions from different schools from around the United States around what exactly Enflux is and how do you know if you’re a good fit for Enflux? So what we wanted to do today is provide a general overview of what Enflux is, and some common challenges that we saw for schools. So with that I’m going to give it over to Abbie and she’ll take you through.
Abbie: Awesome. Thank you Nick. So the first thing we wanted to do is talk about what our mission statement is. So Enflux is an academic intelligence company who works with schools to pull together all the academic and assessment data pieces to improve data-driven decisions within the school. Schools are usually going through the correct motions, but documentation and a lack of monitoring causes problems for all involved. Accreditation is something schools must complete, but it’s an arduous process for everyone involved. So Enflux works hard to make educator’s lives easier. There’s a number of things we want to cover today and we’ll do so by first talking about a challenge our customers faced and then explain the solutions that Enflux offers. Some of the topics we plan to cover include data aggregation, documenting program improvements, increasing student retention, closing the assessment loop, and improving admissions. So for our first challenge, we had a medical school that talk to us about feeling like every time they need to put together some data or a narrative for their self-study, they felt like they were going on a treasure hunt and they go to the office of Student Success first who directed them to the office of Academic Success and they never knew where to go for each specific piece of data. So what we have done is actually pull together all of the disparate data sources across all of the offices and departments at the school into one place that includes admissions data, learning management system information, Exam Soft Data, the student information system, and their licensing examinations. That way they have one place they can go to for all of their data needs. They don’t have to share Excel files. They don’t have to manually concatenate any of their data. Everyone can see all of the data in one place. Another challenge that our schools have faced in particular with one of our smaller schools is that they have a small number of faculty. They have a small number of committee members.
So you would think that being able to communicate and document their decisions would be a lot easier but putting together their self-study involved searching through their emails, looking through their committee meeting notes, and documents from former faculty that had been saved on internal drives. It was a nightmare and that’s their quote. They felt like they had improved the program, but when they went to try to prove that they had a lot of problems. So one of the things that Enflux has done is we provide what’s called an ActionPlan™ tool that allows schools to document tasks or actions and observations by taking a screenshot of the data itself to prove improvements that were made based on those data-driven decisions. So if I’m looking at the AACP survey data, and we make a decision to improve one particular aspect of our Student Success program, I can come back a year or two later after a new survey has been taken and prove that we made an improvement and you can see that data reflected in the dashboards.
We also allow for easy reporting of all of those action plan initiatives and that is what helps you with adding exhibits and other documentation to your self-study. The third challenge that all of our schools seem to be facing is about improving student retention. We work with a private school actually and for this particular school funding is a really big deal. So losing even a single student can have a pretty serious impact on their budget. The school was already working with students who obviously needed remediation, but they needed a way of better catching those students who were just on the cusp of being at risk. So what Enflux has done is put together a dashboard that allows course instructors to identify students at risk before the end of the course so that they can help those students pass the course the first time without needing remediation.
What’s really useful about this dashboard is that you can see if adding additional assessments or changing the desired final score will impact which students have been identified as being at risk or not. So if it’s the beginning of the semester and you know that there’s three more assessments to give it may change who is at risk of not passing the overall course, so it’s really helpful for identifying those students who are just on the cusp of being at risk. We offer a similar sort of dashboard for mentors as well. So if your school has a mentorship program, your mentors will be able to see all of their students and all of the courses for those students. This helps when students come in for a mentorship meeting in particular. It was funny, when we were doing training for one of our Pharmacy schools, the dean brought up that a lot of times when he’s trying to mentor a student he’ll say “well, how did you do on the first test?” and the student says “Oh, well, you know I did okay” and then he’ll pull up this dashboard and look and see that they actually got a 54%, so having this information available to them in one place helps facilitate those one-on-one meetings with students to better identify what the students might need to be working on.
The next challenge we wanted to talk about is regarding monitoring student outcomes and institutional effectiveness and closing that assessment loop. So one of our Pharmacy schools, they have a really good assessment committee and a really good curriculum committee who met regularly to revise their assessments, their items, their curriculum, but although changes were proposed and agreed upon during the meetings, following up on those action items was difficult. Reviewing which items required attention or better category tagging was difficult and a lot of things were getting lost in emails and phone calls. It was a lot of work to try to monitor all of that without having all the data in one place. So one of the things that Enflux has done is we’ve created a dashboard that allows educators to easily track their item validity and assessment reliability without needing a Ph.D. in psychometrics and really any faculty can review their latest items and assessments and see what needs improvement without the assessment committee asking them to make those changes. So it really helps facilitate communication amongst all the faculty. One of the biggest factors with accurate reporting and closing that assessment loop is being able to accurately tag items in ExamSoft with the proper categories. So Enflux simplifies this category tagging task by providing a list of the items that need attention and clearly indicating which categories have not been indicated for these items. So it takes the headache out of item tagging and because the faculty can quickly see why this is important by looking at the other dashboards and seeing how the how the data works in their favor, They are more likely to complete their tagging. In fact, we had a customer ask if Enflux could automatically email faculty who have items that are not tagged so that the assessment office didn’t have to follow up with people. So we’re actually working on implementing that right now, it was a great idea.
Another solution that Enflux provides to its customers is a Curriculum Gap Analysis dashboard. So for example, the curriculum committee, or all faculty for that matter, can easily track curriculum effectiveness and identify gaps between what was supposed to be taught and assessed in each course and what was actually taught and assessed in each course. And that helps facilitate faculty to maintain a bird’s-eye view of the entire program and not just focus on the course that they happen to be teaching. So it keeps that program level improvement at the top of their minds. The last challenge that we wanted to talk about today was improving the admissions process. One of the medical schools that we work with, in particular their admissions department had a really difficult time giving data to other offices and receiving data back from those offices and that impeded their ability to improve their admissions process, which was really critical to improving their student retention.
So what we did was we pulled together an admissions dashboard for them so that by monitoring their longitudinal admissions data, comparing their applicant pools from one year to the next, and then aggregating data from admissions through all of the other data sources to licensure. It’s improved the school’s ability to improve their admissions process, it’s improved their ability to identify applicants who may have difficulty completing the course, and it’s saved the school thousands of dollars. So I know that was a lot of challenges and solutions that we’ve talked about today, but I’m going to turn it back over to Nick now.
Nick: Awesome. Thanks for that. So I know by now a lot of you are wondering “So what makes me or am I a good fit for Enflux?” So if you have any of those challenges, I’d highly recommend you reach out and schedule a demo with us, but just as a recap generally our best selling points or big value adds for schools is if they’re looking to export data from multiple siloed sources. So if you’re sick of spending lots of time having to log into six different systems to try and layer on top of each other to gain insights, we do that all for you automatically. Or if you just have a big pile of ExamSoft questions that you want to tag easier. Let us just link you to the question. So it’s way simpler and then you can actually start driving those results and improvements in real time.
There’s a lot more ways to drive accountability with your CQI initiatives because you can track them and see them and then also streamline that accreditation process. I think my favorite feature for Enflux so far is that if you just plug all of your data, Into our system the outcome of that is accreditation. There’s no more 6 to 16 months. If you try to pull all this data, the reports are generated for you. And then also if you’re just looking to drive up your passing rates, you can finally have a system that has all your data in one place and drives you to better scores. So with that in mind, if you like what you hear, please reach out. You can see my email right there. Just nick@enflux.com or even give us a call at to 210 909-1095. We would love to hear from you and act now because we have some exciting stuff over the summer. We are sending our CEO out on the road. So if you want a live in person demo at your school, now is the time to give us a ring. So, look forward to hearing from you and thanks again for showing up to our webinar.