Introducing LearnSprout 1.1!
It’s only been four months since we first launched LearnSprout and we now have nearly 2,000 schools using our free reporting tool to analyze attendance patterns and spot at-risk students. Since launch, the team has been busy at work building new features and optimizing performance and today we’re excited to announce version 1.1 of LearnSprout.
Speed
The first thing you might notice when you log into LearnSprout is that reports load extremely fast. Most ad-hoc reports using data from the current school year are nearly instant. In a stress test that included twenty schools, LearnSprout was able to report six and a half years worth of data - more than two million attendance events - in just over 90 seconds.
On the back-end, we’ve improved nightly data syncs which now run at a fraction of the time compared to version 1.0. Our specialized integration method does not put any load on your SIS server nor does it interfere with nightly processes. This opens the door to school districts with enrollments up to 100,000 students who can now use LearnSprout to generate instant analytics on their entire student population.
Student List Improvements
When you run a report for the current school year, a list of students with attendance events matching your search criteria appears at the bottom of the page. This list is now sorted by the number of attendance events from most to least. This allows you to quickly spot chronically absent students.
One popular request was the ability to view additional detail for each student in the list. With 1.1, when you click on a student an expanded view displays summary totals by event type and date along with a complete listing of all attendance events.
Improved Account Management
Creating accounts for school principals, counselors, secretaries and other administrators can multiply the benefits of LearnSprout across a district, but folks have told us that the process felt a bit cumbersome and several issues were identified. So here’s what we did:
- We did away with the username requirement. Going forward, new users will create accounts with their email address. You can still sign in with an existing username though.
- We’ve ditched email verification and now take new users directly to the “Last 7 Days” report after they’ve created their account.
- Behind the scenes, we’ve implemented several new security features to further protectuser and school data.
- Cleaned up the look and feel and simplified the sign-in/sign-up process with a unified page. We’ve also added a link in case you forgot your password which wasn’t easy to find before.
- Lots bug fixes!
Now it’s super-easy for master account owners to create accounts and define permissions for all users within a district.
Improved UX
We received a ton of feedback from customers on how we can improve the look and feel of LearnSprout. The new design greatly simplifies the experience making it easier to navigate and run reports. There are more improvements than we can list here, but the effect is clear. Playing with your data should be fun, not confusing!
More to Come!
We’re pretty excited about the release of 1.1 and are loving the early feedback we’re hearing from customers who are geeking out on their own data… But while we’d like to pat ourselves on the back, we’re completely preoccupied with adding the new College Readiness report and are still on track to ship sometime in the coming months. We’re also working hard at adding support for additional student information systems. Since we first announced LearnSprout late last year, we’ve had requests to connect with 70 different types of student information systems! (You can see the complete list on our sign-up page.) And of course, there is no shortage of great ideas for LearnSprout. One of the best parts about working with customers is watching their eyes light up when they see their data for the first time and then listening to all the feature requests that follow. As it stands today, we’ve got more ideas than we can handle, but this is a good problem to have!
Happy data mining!
- Frank