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.

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.

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.