Public School District Gets Insights from Microsoft Teams

Industry: Education

Fulton County Schools gained important insights of how teachers and students utilize Microsoft Teams for Education.

Business Needs

During the COVID-19 crisis, Fulton County Schools (FCS) transitioned from traditional classroom content delivery to online digital teaching and learning. FCS adopted Microsoft Teams for Education as an online platform to foster collaboration between teachers and students. However, FCS struggled for a long time trying to obtain the necessary data from Microsoft Teams to analyze how effectively teachers and students utilize Microsoft Teams in these challenging times. The Microsoft-provided Office 365 Usage Analytics for Power BI didn’t provide the depth of information FCS needed, such as to analyze counts of assignments that teachers give to students and submissions that students prepare for an assignment. FCS also wanted to understand about how often teachers and students meet and for how long.

Solution

More and more organizations are switching to Microsoft Teams mostly for online meetings. However, Microsoft Teams can deliver much more than that. We found that Microsoft Teams is a powerful and extensible platform. For example, Microsoft has provided add-ons for common verticals, such as Teams for Education. Microsoft Teams can be further enriched with apps. When teachers and student collaborate in Microsoft Teams for Education, the data is stored in SharePoint Online. Most of the Microsoft Teams data is exposed via a single data source: Microsoft Graph API.

Unfortunately, calling Graph APIs directly from Power BI was not a feasible option because of the complexities surrounding Graph programming, such as different authentication requirements (delegated and application permissions), data paging (most Graph APIs return 100 records per call), and exception handling. As we found out, processing the data sequentially would have taken some 24 hours which would have been impractical for Power BI dataset refreshes.

Our BI solutions help clients implement a digital feedback loop and act upon the data. The process starts with acquiring the necessary data and designing a comprehensive data model that can answer important business questions. Then, the client applies the insights to improve their processes. This leads to a powerful feedback mechanism where outputs are routed back as inputs to business.

Prologika developed a custom app to extract the required data by calling the Microsoft Graph APIs. The app supported a configurable degree of parallelism to process data in parallel. This reduced the duration for the full load to less than 9 hours. In addition, incremental daily ETL decreased the extraction time even further. The data was saved in a relational database consisting of several entities, such as Schools, Classes, Assignments, Submissions, and Events. Data availability led to data analytics. Power BI reports were implemented to deliver important insights, such as the interactive report below.

Benefits

Prologika helped FCS to gain important insights of how teachers and students utilized Microsoft Teams for Education. The key solution benefits were:

• Automated daily retrieval of Teams data
• Enabled a digital feedback loop to learn from the gathered insights and improve operations
• Ability to analyze educational data by various perspectives (school, class, teacher, student, assignments, submissions and events)