Please note: This transcript has been reviewed but may still contain errors.
Tiago Penteado: Welcome everyone.
Tiago Penteado: I'll just introduce everyone. So I'm Tiago, I'm the head of marketing here. I'll be, sitting in the background today, just,fielding your questions to Kurt and Ronan at the end of the webinar.
Tiago Penteado: So if you've got anything, put it in the Q&A, chat down the bottom of your screen. Um, we've got Ronan here, our product manager, and then, Kurt, our head of product as well. So I'll hand it over to you, Kurt.
Kurt Meyer: Thanks Tiago, all right, I'll just share my screen and we can get into it.
Kurt Meyer: Okay. Thank you so much everyone for joining. yeah, it's been a couple months since we did our last. what's new webinar? So we're excited to share what we've been working on and we've got a few updates to go through. for those of you who don't know, Orah. we've been around for about 10 years.
Kurt Meyer: we started in the boarding school industry, and still very much work with boarding schools, but also private day schools as well. across 20 countries and over 350 schools now. And,our main focus is helping, schools meet and exceed their duty of care. what duty of care means to us at Orah is making sure that students are accounted for both physically and mentally.
Kurt Meyer: so those aspects of what we really, I. try to help schools improve. And the three main categories that we focus on are, attendance, wellbeing, and communications. And those categories help answer some fundamental questions that, we believe that every school needs to know about their students being where are they, how are they, and are we connected?
Kurt Meyer: So this webinar is mainly focused on the attendance and location space. helping schools better answer that question. Where are they?
Kurt Meyer: All right. So I'll jump into our first, update that we've been working on, which is daily attendance. so daily attendance. Is a way to track a student's presence on a day-to-day basis versus on a class by class basis. so we've done a lot of work around class attendance, but now we've also introduced this new type of attendance record, for tracking daily attendance and daily attendance can show, a much different, Behavior than class attendance. For example, if a student is arriving to school late, on a daily basis, then that's a different story to if they're arriving to their classes late. so arriving to school late might be, a conversation that you have with the parents. but arriving to classes late throughout the day could be just a.
Kurt Meyer: Something that's happening with the student, while they're at school. daily attendance is also a good way to look at, attendance patterns over longer periods of time. because class attendance can get a little bit, a little bit fuzzy over long periods, but when you're looking at, a whole term or, a whole year worth of data.
Kurt Meyer: Daily attendance really helps you simplify it so you can just see, okay. Have they, were they at school? for each day in, in that period. Okay. So I'll give you a few examples of how we,use daily attendance in Orah. so the first one is daily attendance records. So if you go to the location attendance page under student records, you'll notice that we have this new status here for daily attendance, and these statuses are created based on class attendance.
Kurt Meyer: So daily attendance is automatically generated. And, I'll show you how you can set up those rules, as well. So we can see here we have a couple of students that have been marked as excused for the day, and if we look to the right, we can see, they've got a couple of classes where they've been marked as excused as well.
Kurt Meyer: And if we hover over the status here, let's say student was excused, absent for all classes throughout the day, but we've also got this saying that the status is still pending. It hasn't been finalized. Because there's still scheduled roles waiting to be completed for the day. so as roles or classes, are marked for attendance, then the daily status can update as well if it changes based on the roles that you've set.
Kurt Meyer: We can see here that we've got one seated mark present for the day. And so they only had one scheduled class, which was marked as president. And this other role check here, this is a, this is our demo account, but this is a emergency role check. So emergency roles or ad hoc roles, or automated roles, three other role types that Orah, provides.
Kurt Meyer: Those types of roles aren't, taken into account when calculating daily attendance. A daily attendance is only based on scheduled, classes. yeah, so very quickly you can just get a sense of, okay, who's here for the day, who's late and he's ex excused, absent. And there'll be flags if. the data, the status could still change based on the,the roles being completed.
Kurt Meyer: this one here, late for the day is a good example. So you can see the student was, marked as absent for their first class and present for their next class, which means that they were late for the day. But there's still, remaining role records, so the status is pending. this one here though, we can see that they were late for their first class and present for their second class, so then they're late for the day.
Kurt Meyer: so that's what it looks like on a day-to-day basis. you can configure the daily attendance settings under the attendance settings, general settings tab. And there'll be a section here for setting up your daily attendance policies. so you can assign daily attendance PO policies to different year levels or grade levels.
Kurt Meyer: And there's two types of policies that can be based on the first scheduled class of the day, which is typically used for lower year levels. You can also set that to specific classes. So if you had like a homeroom class or maybe you want to ignore advisories and activities and only take into account academics, then you can apply an additional filter onto that type of policy.
Kurt Meyer: the other policy, which is the policy that we use by default is all classes throughout the day. so that's. How those examples that I was running through before are being calculated. it's taking into account all of the classes and, generating a status based on, the class attendance statuses.
Kurt Meyer: And then you'll see a little description here for each of these statuses. and there's also a fallback option if a student isn't assigned to a year or grade level. So you can set up that, attendance policy as well.
Kurt Meyer: Great. So that's how you set up the daily attendance policies. we've also added daily attendance insights to the insights dashboards. so you'll notice on all of these, widgets, you can toggle between class attendance and daily attendance.
Kurt Meyer: So if I go, we'll say a longer timeframe.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, we can see that. all students, they've got a 92.9% daily attendance rate, but, a 96%, class attendance rate. You can see how that, might change over time as well.
Kurt Meyer: daily attendance is also used for highlighting students. So you can see students who are most unexcused absent, most late or most excused, absent both on a class or daily attendance basis. 'cause sometimes those. Students at different groups of students. yep. Also for attendance train, attendance by excuse type, and for your, attendance metrics for each student.
Kurt Meyer: You can also flip between class and day attendance and apply filters as well. so that you can say if you just wanted to get students who are late for the day, you can. create a filter for tardy days more than one, and they'll show you all the students who have a tardy within that period.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. All right. Hey, Kurt, we've actually got a question, before we move on to the next, So someone asked, do these attendance policy settings only work with SIS based roles as opposed to roles set up through Orah? And if so, are there any plans to allow this module to read metrics rates and concerns from Orah based roles?
Kurt Meyer: Yep. Great question. So, um, daily attendance policies work with both,attendance records. So if you are, if you're only using Orah for. Dashboard and alerts, and you are syncing over all of your,data from the SIS, then you can still generate daily attendance based on your SIS data. but also if you're using Orah for your primary attendance system and everyone's taking attendance in Orah, then that would also, update your daily attendance policies as well.
Kurt Meyer: Cool. Thank you. so that is daily attendance.
Kurt Meyer: The next update that I wanted to share, was being able to customize, insights, dashboards and be able to share them with specific user roles. So if we go back to the, dashboard view, you'll notice that we've got the share option now. so this main board here, this is the default board that all users can see.
Kurt Meyer: You can't delete this board, but you can, customize it and rename it. And, you can also create, new views as well. So I. So this one, for example, it's set to a timeframe for the last 12 weeks and it's only been shared to,currently I'm the only one who has access to it. But if I was to create a new board, I can apply a default timeframe.
Kurt Meyer: So let's say last 30 days, I can, send it to a specific year level or. Exclude certain year levels. So say if I wanted to exclude year 10 and 11 from this,
Kurt Meyer: and I can also switch the toggle for class or daily attendance. and this will be saved to the, defaults for this dashboard. and I can also remove widgets that I don't. I think are necessary for, the specific, users that I'm setting up this dashboard for. So maybe I only wanna show them,
Kurt Meyer: just a simple dashboard. You've only got the top attendance metrics and then the attendance table below. and it's set to daily attendance, or both. And I'll do a longer timeframe. Yep. So I'll go ahead and save that. So you can see we've got a simplified dashboard here. the defaults are a timeframe and filters are set.
Kurt Meyer: And yeah, it's already set to daily attendance. So if I go back here. All of these defaults are set and I can share this with, a specific user role as well. So say if I was setting this up for advisors or maybe, year level coordinators for the junior school, I could set up a user role for that and just invite that user role to be able to view, this dashboard.
Kurt Meyer: So whenever they log in, They would see this tab for,within the insights tab that's already been set up for them. if you don't see the share option, it is a user permission that needs to be enabled, by an administrator. So if you go into staff, User permissions, or you could do this in user roles, you need to have the
Kurt Meyer: shared, customized insights, views, permission enabled. So any users who have this will be able to create, those dashboards and share them with other users. And they'll also be able to, Customize the main board here that,all users can see by default.
Kurt Meyer: so yeah, that's the, sharing custom insights, dashboards, and we really made that for,administrators to be able to set up Orah and create these dashboards for different, Audiences and view, viewers so that when they log in, it's already set up for them. and by default, a user would only see, the students that they're assigned to.
Kurt Meyer: So you can take that into account when you're setting up these dashboards. so for example, if you had a teacher dashboard, teachers when they look at that dashboard would only see students that they're assigned to.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. Hey, Kurt, so another question from, so question from Steven. Is this a attendance dashboard, an add-on feature?
Kurt Meyer: No, this is, this comes with the, inside dashboard.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah. So if you have supervised basic already, you should, be able to access it.
Kurt Meyer: Yep, that's right.
Kurt Meyer: All right. And the next update that I'm excited to share, we just, released this one, two days ago, is, a brand new page to manage passes, from one place and so passes. the terminology can be customized to be absences, excuses, or leave. That's one of the core,features of Orah and it plays a big role for boarding schools and for excusing students, or class attendance.
Kurt Meyer: So it's one of the most important, features that, is inbuilt into Orah. And, any power users or anyone who uses Orah frequently would know that passes are key to pulling everything together. because it's such an old, features, something that we've been working on for years, it was getting to a point where the workflows around passes were getting a bit disjointed.
Kurt Meyer: so there would be different pages that you would have to go to in order to complete, certain tasks that relate to passes. So we wanted to, consolidate everything, put it all in one place. When you're working with passes, you can just do it, centrally. So that just reduces the number of clicks you have to do a navigation.
Kurt Meyer: we created global filters and search to make it easier to, find students on passes or pass records. And we also added the ability to view archived passes which currently, previously wasn't available. so I'll just bring that up. Now, so in under the location tab, you'll notice a new page for passes.
Kurt Meyer: and yeah, so this brings together a few things into one place. so requests are here, scheduled and active passes here, whereas before requests, We had, we still have these pages, but we'll, remove them, after we've collected enough feedback and we feel confident that, the new past pages is, stable.
Kurt Meyer: we've done a lot of testing, so we think it is, but we just wanna make sure before we remove the old ones, So you can do everything related to passes just from this page. So you can review approve requests, you can activate upcoming, scheduled passes. you can view all of your currently active passes.
Kurt Meyer: And you can also see, archived passes that have been ended or canceled. you can apply filters. So let's just say if you just wanted to see,
Kurt Meyer: look at the gym pass.
Kurt Meyer: If you just wanted to see Gym Pass, you can apply that filter and that filter would, be applied to all of the tabs as well. So you can see we've got 12 requested. 160 that have been scheduled and seven currently active. And when you go into archive, you'd see, the filter applies to your archive as well.
Kurt Meyer: you can also search by student, staff member or pass as well in the searching box. And that would also apply to, all of these tabs.
Kurt Meyer: so yeah, just really easy to, find passes and often we get schools or,administrators or staff members who've created a whole bunch of passes, but they, they want to just delete them because it was a mistake. so in that sort of case, you can apply, filter, go to active or whichever state those passes are in.
Kurt Meyer: Select them can do a bulk selection and then, you can just delete them or end them, on mass. So it really simplifies just the general, management of passes. you can also create passes. From this page, previously you would have to either go to the home board or a student's profile to create a page, create a pass.
Kurt Meyer: But if you're on this page and you're working with passes and you know you've deleted one and you wanna create a new one, then you could just hit create pass, select the student or students and,take it from there and fill out the pass information.
Kurt Meyer: so yeah, that simplifies everything to do with, managing passes. You can all do it from that place. And we've got these two tabs here still, for managing requests and student schedule. as I mentioned, our plan is to remove these two pages. Eventually, so you'll just be left with this, new pass page.
Kurt Meyer: we still intend to keep the timeline view, but that's going to be moved, to a different page under attendance. So you'd still see the timeline, but they'll just be in the attendance page. so no loss functionality, just yeah, bringing things together so it's easier to manage.
Kurt Meyer: Okay. So that's the new, pass update. And the next one, which is actually upcoming, is an attendance modes option. I thought I just mentioned this as a, just to let folks know that this update is in the pipeline and, we're hoping to release it over the next. Two to four weeks. But it depends on the feedback that we, get from schools.
Kurt Meyer: so the attendance mode is, sorry, this is on our test account 'cause we haven't released it yet. So if we go to our test account, this is what it would look like. So we're introducing two. Options to help schools easily configure Orah, to cater to the way that they're using or for attendance. so there's gonna be two modes to choose from.
Kurt Meyer: There's gonna be the attendance insights mode where, you're still using the SIS as the primary attendance system and Orah's just syncing the data from the s AEs to generate the insights dashboard and alerts. Or you could use a full attendance management mode where you are using Orah for. your primary attendance system, everyone's taking attendance and Orah, and the Insights dashboard is using the attendance data from within Orah.
Kurt Meyer: typically to, switch between these two modes. There's a lot of different configuration options that you have to set up in different places, which get a bit tricky. and so we just wanted to simplify it. So you simply just choose. How we're going to use Orah, and then we'll make a lot of the configuration options in the background and that helps avoid, situations where things, aren't set up properly and you can have conflicting data and you have to start, trying to figure out what, what's going on.
Kurt Meyer: So this just simplifies that whole process. So this is ready to go, but we're just waiting for feedback from schools who are actually using both Orah and the SIS for taking attendance. So we're asking them, which, which merge we switch their account to. and we're just waiting on that feedback before we, go live with this.
Kurt Meyer: Okay. So that is all the updates that I had and, yeah, I'll pass it over to you, Renan. Ro
Tiago Penteado: Ronan just messaged me. He's having a bit of trouble with his voice today. he was wondering if you could take us through those slides.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, no problem. yeah, Ronan's been under the weather lately, so can understand that he's not up full, a webinar.
Kurt Meyer: so yeah, so from Ronan's end a couple of updates that we've been working on, Around integrations and our API, the first one is an improvement to our synergetic integration, which is an Australian based SIS. so we're syncing over the core student information as well as daily attendance insights.
Kurt Meyer: so if we think about those two attendance modes, synergetic is currently set up for the attendance insights mode where you can use Orah for. Generating the insights dashboard and generating alerts, but we don't have it to the point where you can use it for full attendance management yet. So we've got that first mode, but not the second mode if you're using Synergetic.
Kurt Meyer: and the next update is an update to our API. and that's the ability to, create, passes via the API. So if I go to our API
Kurt Meyer: documentation page, we've created some new endpoints for,
Kurt Meyer: creating passes. So we can get passes, we can create passes, we can delete passes. So all of this can be done through the API. Now, one thing I'd mention that if you are going to use the API to manage passes, when they're created through the API, they override a lot of the, business rules that are inbuilt into passes, which are typically designed for user, validation.
Kurt Meyer: So the API generator passes basically, able to be created freely without having to take into account a lot of the business rules that you might have set up. For example, if a pass, can't be created or can't be ended,
Kurt Meyer: without, checking into a certain location. then this like an API created password, just, override those sorts of rules. we think that gives administrators the most flexibility so that they can, just achieve what they want to achieve without having to, go in and change any settings or, the thinking is that, their intentions behind using the API is.
Kurt Meyer: that's what they want to happen and they shouldn't have to navigate all the different settings. so yeah, we've just released that. I think that is all of our updates for today. I just wanted to mention that, we post all of these updates into our announcements page. So in the upper right hand corner, you see this, megaphone icon.
Kurt Meyer: and that'll take you to, a log of all of the different updates that, we've released, some of which I've covered today. And you can also, toggle along this email notification option as well. So whenever we post to this page, you'll get notified automatically.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. I, all right. Actually have a few questions in the Q&A and this just a prompt as well for anyone. have you've got any questions for Kurt, just to drop them in the chat now? so let's go through these, So, Steven shared that his attendance page doesn't look like your page, Kurt.
Tiago Penteado: okay. At the moment the pass page is blank. do you have any idea why that might be?
Kurt Meyer: this page right here. This one?
Tiago Penteado: I assume that's the one he means.
Kurt Meyer: I'm not sure, but we can follow up with you, Steven, to see, what's going on there.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, might guess. Yeah.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah. it's, It's the feature, like this should, there's no kind of feature flagging for this page, so everyone should have access to it. yeah, we'll check in with you Steven to see what's going on there.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. and then we've got one from, so going back to passes for on the create pass button right there.
Tiago Penteado: Mm-hmm. Um, does it, does create a pass respect parent endorsement settings for a pass or does it bypass it?
Kurt Meyer: it would bypass it. So it's the same functionality as creating a pass from the home board. the way that Orah works, if a staff member is creating a pass, then that bypasses all of the, requests, endorsement and approval processes. But,you can set up passes in that way so that.
Kurt Meyer: Parents would, request it first and endorse it and then, you'll give it an approval. But if you're creating the pass directly from here, then it'll just go straight to either scheduled or active.
Tiago Penteado: Okay. Awesome. Yep. That's great. Elaine said that her attendance page doesn't look the same as well. so we'll can print for you two. Elaine. Is it, just to clarify, is that, so this is the passes page that is different to the other one. So you say an attendance page doesn't look the same?
Kurt Meyer: Yeah. Is it one of these pages or is it the new passes pages page.
Tiago Penteado: Interesting.
Tiago Penteado: we will follow up with you guys afterwards as well, to clarify what's going on there. but yeah, the attendance, I don't see the tabs at the top. So the insights group records, student records, I assume.
Kurt Meyer: Oh, okay. But these tab here, yeah, that could be a permission. A permission thing. So yeah, we'll circle back and see, what's going on with those.
Tiago Penteado: Okay, cool. yeah, I think that's the main questions. oh, Art did mention something that did come up as well. The new passes page took a while to load the first time, but it's now working fine. I think that's to do with that, that first release and figuring that out. But I assume that's been resolved now Kurt..
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, we're still monitoring it. keeping an eye out for feedback, so if you're noticing that it's loading slowly, please do let us know and we'll look into it. but yeah, we haven't had any. Any reports from schools yet saying that they've noticed it, not loading or being slow, but, yeah, that's good. So if you've seen it happening, just let us know and we'll look into it.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. so we'll follow up with everyone who's,put in the Q&A that we need to follow up with. There's one, one person there that's marked as anonymous about that made a comment about their attendance page as well. I'll just say if you can message Kurt, as email to, to follow up on that, if you want some help there, um, we can, we can sort that out for you.
Kurt Meyer: Yep. So here's my email here. kurt@orah.com. Let me know if there's any questions at all or if you want help with anything that we walked through today. But yeah, would be happy to, jump on a call and work through it.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. That's all the questions we got. so yeah. Thank you. Thank you everyone for joining.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome. Thanks so much everyone.
