What is SRES?

Helping to foster human relationships

It’s not just about the data, but having the right data at the right time in the right place does help.

This 17 minute presentation gives a good summary of what can happen when educators are given the right data and use it meaningfully to support students through SRES.

The Student Relationship Engagement System was developed by teachers to help other teachers personalise engagement with large student cohorts. Teachers consistently report that positive feedback from students “shows how helpful SRES is in allowing us to give the kind of personalised attention to students that time wouldn’t otherwise allow”. From helping to mark attendance, analyse grades, collect live feedback, and provide easy ways to personalise feedback and learning support at scale to students via emails and web portals, SRES gives teachers access to data that are meaningful in their contexts and helps them to create personalised learning environments with targeted feedback and support.

Schematic showing overview of the SRES

Overview of the SRES

Getting data in

SRES focuses on helping you work with data that you consider important in your context, not the data that just happens to live in a big data warehouse somewhere.

(A) Every teacher works with spreadsheets, either ones they create themselves about their students, or ones that are available to download from other systems. SRES helps you easily import these so that you can bring disparate data together.

(B and C) Often the ‘right’ data for the job lives on scraps of paper, or is never properly recorded. SRES can fix this. Coordinators can easily design data entry and viewing interfaces that are mobile-friendly so that data can be entered by your teaching team anywhere there is an internet connection. (C) Rubrics, free text comments, grades, and more – SRES is flexible enough to support most information you’d like to record about your students. Check out some examples. (B) The mobile app can show any data the SRES has about a particular student – use this to surface relevant information in the right place at the right time. When walking around your class to scan students’ ID cards to check their attendance, wouldn’t it be great to see how they did on the latest quiz and any feedback a previous tutor has left for them, so you can strike up a conversation?

(D) The SRES database stores student data centrally and securely. The data is always up to date. Coordinators have full access and can provide restricted access to tutors, auditors, and other staff.

Using data meaningfully

(E) Coordinators can build customisable and personalised messages to send to select groups of students based on data that the SRES has on students. You can include each student’s preferred name, their grades, feedback, and anything else in the database. Not only that, you can also design parts of the message to drop in and out depending on rules that you determine: only need to suggest a resource for students who haven’t posted on the discussion board? SRES makes this easy.

(F) Emails are a great way to communicate, but you can also build custom web pages (we call them ‘web portals’) to show your students their information and customise feedback and other learning support. These web portals can be embedded into any learning management system, or can be viewed independently. Need to show a particular resource to students who failed their last quiz and haven’t turned up to class for a couple of weeks?  SRES makes this easy.

(G) Sometimes it’s easier to see things when they’re graphed out. You can build simple dashboards that show aggregate data in graphical form. Easily examine class distributions and proportions, and even build simple pivot charts to compare data. Better yet, you can share these dashboards with tutors, and even students themselves so they can see what’s going on in the class.

Flagship features

The SRES is built with teachers and students at the centre. Here are its main features that can help you enhance student engagement and their learning experience.

You're in the driver's seat

As a teacher, you’re the most well-connected with your course’s learning design and your students. You know what data are meaningful for engagement and success, and SRES will help you bring it together.

Fully customisable

Almost everything in SRES is customisable. Need an extra column of data? Easy. Want a different type of chart? A click away. Need to build a custom rubric for feedback entry? Done.

Mobile-friendly

Have data at your fingertips when interacting with students. Use a mobile-friendly web app to enter, see, and use data.

Supports teaching teams

Give your teaching team access to enter and see the right data with a range of permissions settings.

Take attendance

Take attendance and build relationships at the same time. SRES has many ways to make this possible. Check out some examples.

Visualise data easily

Build simple charts to quickly visualise class data, or customise pivot charts for comparisons.

Personalise emails at scale

Customise and target the recipients and content of emails using engagement and success data that SRES has about your students. Check out some examples.

Web portals

Build web portals that display targeted messages and resources to students. Check out an example.

Familiarity plus

Teachers are used to working with spreadsheets. SRES data structure will make lots of sense – rows of students and as many columns of information as you need.

Calculator included

Create formulas and easily perform calculations on data. Average of best 5 grades? Easy. Weightings? Done.

Help is at hand

A full user guide is available to take you through how to make the most of the SRES. You’re even invited to edit this guide to help make it better.

Central database

All data are transferred and stored securely and centrally, enabling real-time access and usage of data.

Free

As a teaching-research initiative, we are happy to share SRES with interested teachers free of charge. Get in touch!

For the techs

SRES is built in Python with the Flask framework and uses MongoDB. Javascript, HTML5, and CSS3 are used to power the front-end experience.

Award-winning approach

2022 Exemplar in Jisc Principles of good assessment and feedback report
2021
 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report Learning Analytics exemplar
2020 Reimagine Education ICT Tools for Learning and Teaching Award Gold Winner
2019 Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning
2019 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report Analytics Technology exemplar
2017 Pearson ACODE Award for Innovation in Technology Enhanced Learning
2016 ASCILITE Innovation Award winner
2015 Reimagine Education ICT Tools Awards (Finalist)
2015 ASCILITE Awards for Excellence in Learning Analytics (Finalist)

Made by teachers, with love
We are teachers. We work on the SRES in our spare time, without any funding, because we believe in enhancing teacher-student relationships by using data in a meaningful and context-sensitive way.