Anthology uses embedded analytics offered by Amazon QuickSight to democratize decision making for higher education

This is a guest post from Anthology. Created in the merger of four leading education technology companies—Blackboard, Campus Management, Campus Labs, and iModules—Anthology offers the world’s largest global EdTech ecosystem. Delivering and supporting Learning Management Systems, Student Information Systems, and Customer Relationship Management products, they operate in over 80 countries, serving more than 150 million learners, educators, and administrators.

Providing technology and support within education means Anthology has a responsibility to deliver cutting-edge solutions that have real impact on student, instructor, and administrator success. Our aim is to be as holistic as possible: delivering cross-organization visibility, analytics, and insight; giving real-time guidance; serving requests efficiently; and creating custom, visual-led dashboards for our customers. Maintaining an ongoing level of excellence is how we can best help monitor and guide students to success.

Anthology’s differentiator is in the “last mile” of analytics–going beyond mere visualization. Our systems have to deliver analysis, communicate important points, and suggest evidence-based actions to be as supportive as possible for educators. This relies on aligning analytics and institutional intelligence from all relevant sources, and being able to assemble it in a meaningful way for non-technical users.

In this post, we share how Anthology evolved its analytics and business intelligence platform – Anthology Illuminate – through embedded business intelligence (BI) dashboards, embedded Q&A, and visualizations from a variety of datasets with Amazon QuickSight.

Dispersed data

Anthology is committed to integrating datasets across solutions, but we saw that our clients were struggling to find the resources and skills needed to able to derive key insights from that integrated data set.

It was just as vital to refine the way we provided that “last mile” value that differentiates us from others. We had a list of capabilities that we wanted to incorporate by working with an advanced BI company like QuickSight, including:

• Visualization options for clear data presentation
• Interactivity for our customers to be able to achieve their specific goals for the system
• Governed data access to secure important, personally identifiable education data
• Personalization to meet the needs of different educational users and their organizations

Most importantly, we wanted to be able to provide this within our existing Anthology application by embedding these capabilities into a single solution to provide an efficient, streamlined user experience that enabled self-service analysis.

And this new capability needed to serve millions of higher education practitioners spread across more than 80 countries. So scalability, language accessibility, and cost were key factors.

Choosing the right BI partner

As we began work on the evolution of Anthology Illuminate – our analytics and institutional intelligence platform- QuickSight stood out for a number of reasons.

To start, we had an existing relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), who hosted our Blackboard® Learn solution and powered analytics across its vast datasets for our learning management system users. We already knew and loved the data reporting and visualization tools that AWS could deliver through the partnership, so it felt like a natural fit.

We found Amazon Q in QuickSight especially exciting because of its ability to use natural language to explore data and answer questions, providing data-driven stories and experiences within end-users’ workflows. Amazon Q in QuickSight is a collection of generative BI capabilities that use large language models (LLMs) to make finding, analyzing, and acting on information as intuitive as possible. We wanted to build Amazon Q in QuickSight into our offering to make BI approachable and straightforward to understand for educators.

Being an AWS product, QuickSight also had the geographic reach and smart scalability that would allow us to serve our customers worldwide. Additionally, the white-labelling support and the ability to be embed within user-facing applications meant that with QuickSight we could include BI within our own offerings in a seamless way.

Cost was an important factor. Most business analysis tools are expensive and licensed per user upfront annually, making them cost-prohibitive. Per-user licensing and the ability to cap the cost per user were critical to turning a profit on our products. Finally, accessibility options and easy-to-understand UX were key in providing users with a satisfying data experience.

Combining numerous datasets for powerful clarity

At its core, our work with QuickSight was to embed its question and answer capabilities, dashboards, and data visualization into our Anthology Illuminate interface. This allowed us to provide interactive data exploration experiences to our users through the application they were already familiar with.

The most challenging aspect of this is the breadth of data that we draw from and use. Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Student Information Systems (SIS) were both incorporated together, with future plans for incorporating higher education’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data to build an all-encompassing dataset. QuickSight made this extremely complex undertaking far less complicated to achieve, pulling data directly from our Illuminate data platform. Illuminate aggregates data from multiple distributed systems and applications, so QuickSight APIs made it possible to pull together different sets for analysis and monitoring.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of embedding rich analytics capabilities into our offering. This allows educators and administrators to quickly find the information necessary to monitor and support students in reaching their potential.

The data starts at student enrollment, through to graduation, and beyond to alumni (such as their advancement and contributions). Course modality, enrollment status, grades, assessments, classroom information, and course engagement all form part of the information Anthology provides. Educators can use it to provide personalized student recommendations, reports, and other useful deliverables.

For a handful of early adopter organizations, we also had Amazon Q in QuickSight deployed within Anthology Illuminate, opening up analytics in a powerful and unique way via the natural language querying of vital data. In our pilot run, Anthology Illuminate had 600 active users from 260 client institutions.

Delivering holistic educational value

The results of Anthology’s use of QuickSight means we can deliver better insight for education professionals and advance our reputation as a cutting-edge EdTech leader.

Embedded Q&A, visualizations, and dashboards within our application deliver clear, actionable data, and help build recommended actions and communications to benefit students in a way that feels intuitive and clear for end-users.

The highlight of our Anthology Illuminate offering will be the real-time question and answer capability. We added the generative Q&A capability offered by Amazon Q in Quicksight to offer institutions self-serve options for analytics needs that aren’t directly addressed by the central dashboards.

With generative Q&A capabilities embedded directly in Illuminate, end-users can ask a question in natural language to go deeper into an emerging trend they notice or gain context not presented in dashboards without needing any domain or technical expertise. It gives them instant access without having to tap report authors for more time.

Illuminate users can ask questions such as, “Show the distribution of total course accesses per student across courses in the term,” or, “Compare students’ grades of previous year to this year.” They’ll get back a multi-visual response with a direct answer to their question as well as additional context that may not have been apparent.

From a developer’s perspective, it’s a simple task to set up end-to-end embedding in their application using QuickSight APIs. It took our developers less than a day to get everything running. The SDK options provide comprehensive support for customization where the developers can:

• Make the landing panel full or reduced to a search bar
• Apply a custom theme
• Control topic selection and showing topic names
• Show or hide the pinboard, Q icon, and maximization button
• Customize title and placeholder texts

The following example shows what the embedded Q&A experience in Illuminate looks like today.

Aside from the Q&A embedding, Anthology is using other embedded QuickSight functions to enrich their application:

• LMS trends report embedded in the student advisor dashboard in Anthology Reach CRM (using embedded QuickSight dashboard)
  
• Student engagement report (using embedded QuickSight dashboard)
  
• Console authoring (using embedded QuickSight console)
  

Combining information from multiple applications into a single source of BI gives end-users a holistic view of student and institutional success for insight and analysis. In the fast-paced educational field, this unlocks a deeper level of understanding for educators without the need to comb through various datasets and manually assess what they find. Using QuickSight and its generative BI capabilities has allowed us to democratize educational analytics. Exploration and action of important information is now in the hands of every administrator, advisor, or faculty member that uses the system. Currently, over 200 institutional groups are using Anthology’s QuickSight-powered, self-service analytics offering, with fast onboarding of the technology continuing across our global territories.

To the future

There’s plenty more to come from the Anthology and QuickSight partnership. We are looking to improve users’ ability to manage and customize Anthology Illuminate. This includes providing telemetry data to our development teams to aid decision-making. Finally, we’re continuing to develop our use of Amazon Q in QuickSight, rolling it out to a larger portion of our user base, and improving the system’s ability to filter and display specific data topics for specific queries.

The most exciting capability that the Anthology and QuickSight partnership offers is – to be the first EdTech partnership that uses generative AI technology to help clients understand and use their data.

Get started with QuickSight

To learn more about how QuickSight can help your business create exciting new applications, save on in-house development time, and bring data insights to customers, visit Amazon QuickSight.

To learn more about Anthology Illuminate, visit their website.

About the Authors

Juan Lopez

Carisa Stringer

Steve Bailey

Maria Correal

Kathy Huffstetler

Shyamal Krishna