Mesquite ISD helps students connect their passions to future success
About Mesquite ISD
The mission of Mesquite ISD is to develop an inspiring and innovative learning community that educates and empowers students to pursue excellence. The district serves nearly 39,000 students on 48 campuses.
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Using Google Cloud and BigQuery, the Mesquite Independent School District built AYO (“eye-oh”), a data warehouse designed to help educators create tailored learning pathways for students.
- Builds custom platform for differentiated learning
- Flexible data warehouse can analyze structured and unstructured data
- Insights are understandable to non-technical users
Scales to handle traffic from 2,000 faculty, students and staff daily
Mesquite ISD helps students connect their passions to their future success
With Google Cloud and BigQuery, the Texas school district embraces data analytics to personalize learning
Education leaders at the Mesquite Independent School District in Mesquite, Texas, want every student to embrace their passions and use them to guide their education. They also firmly believe that a “one size fits all” education isn’t the way to get there.
“Standardization is limiting,” explains Dr. David Vroonland, Mesquite ISD’s Superintendent of Schools. “We believe it’s not designed to create equity. It’s designed to rank students so as to reveal who is the best and brightest. This is how education became about comparisons of groups, rather than the unique potential of every child.”
To create consistent economic opportunity in a district where 76 percent of students are on free or reduced lunch, Vroonland and his colleagues want to guide educators in helping students explore in depth what makes them happy, where that happiness aligns with their aptitudes, and where that can take them in the work world. The challenge was identifying student passions and matching them up with a learning pathway. The solution was leveraging data science.
Working with Google for Education and Google partner SoftServe, Mesquite ISD used Google Cloud to create AYO, a data warehouse to provide holistic overviews of students’ learning styles and predict the teaching styles that are the best fit for students’ unique abilities.
A new strategy for a changing district
In the past 10 years, the Mesquite ISD district has changed dramatically: The region has experienced tremendous growth as a major transportation hub for Dallas, and the number of students speaking English as a second language is also on the rise. The challenge of serving so many learners with diverse needs drove new conversations about equity in education.
“That’s an important discussion in the context of poverty,” Vroonland says. “If we don’t create adults who are nimble, responsive to change, and have greater agency over their work, the separation between the have and have-nots will grow.”
Vroonland and Dr. Angel Rivera, the district’s superintendent for innovation and leadership, believed rapid deployment was essential for a data warehousing tool that would help perform deeper analysis of students’ capabilities and passions, which is where a student’s unique potential lies. For one thing, the pace of change in the workplace is speeding up, and Mesquite ISD doesn’t want to be behind the curve when it comes to graduating students who are ready for work. However, Vroonland and Rivera knew that a data warehouse incorporating artificial intelligence would require time for gathering data and fine-tuning results.
A design-thinking workshop solidifies the approach
In the course of brainstorming ways to meet the challenge of matching student passions with learning programs, Vroonland was concerned that proposed solutions would still rely on a framework of standardized learning, which was what the district wanted to move away from.
“AI should be putting us in a space where we can tap into the unique qualities of individuals, not just help students navigate the status quo,” Vroonland says. “We didn’t want to simply enhance existing processes—we wanted to change them.”
The Mesquite team began talking with Google about creating the solution using Google Cloud—and in particular BigQuery, the serverless, multicloud data warehouse. Google recommended the district work with SoftServe to help build out the data warehouse. The first step was a design-thinking workshop where school district leaders could define their goals and determine how to generate results that made sense to educators.
“We were very nebulous about how we’d create this solution until we started working with SoftServe. But once the SoftServe team came to the table with their storyboard, it clarified the project for us.”
—Angel Rivera, Superintendent for Innovation and Leadership, Mesquite Independent School DistrictData analytics for non-technical users
The workshop brought Mesquite teachers, administrators, and technical leaders together with Google Cloud experts to talk through approaches for maximizing student opportunities after graduation. Realizing that an off-the-shelf data solution wouldn’t be a good match for Mesquite’s goals, the district decided to work with SoftServe to create one from scratch. That process ensured that the data warehouse, which came to be known as AYO, would be the answer to Mesquite’s challenge.
“We were very nebulous about how we’d create this solution until we started working with SoftServe,” Rivera says. “But once the SoftServe team came to the table with their storyboard, it clarified the project for us.” For example, AYO’s framework for ingesting and analyzing data identifies elements and traits that express student passions, which can help educators and parents better understand students’ potential.
The AYO data warehouse relies on BigQuery, the data warehouse from Google Cloud. BigQuery has been pivotal to the development of AYO in terms of gathering data from multiple places, such as student performance, student writing samples, and surveys of students. BigQuery brings this data together to give the parent, the student, and the educator a profile of the student’s passion and aptitude, which can be used to contextualize learning.
“We don’t think of potential as someone getting an A grade,” Vroonland says. “And it’s about more than passions. It’s about seeing the alignment between passion and aptitude, because this is where a student's unique potential falls.”
Another key component of building out the data warehouse is ensuring that non-technical experts can use it and understand its recommendations for learning programs. In addition, AYO needed the ability to take in both structured and unstructured data, explains Ron Espinosa, principal for SoftServe.
“For AYO to remain as nimble and fluid as possible, we have to consider that data points will change over time,” Espinosa says. “They’ll also come from anywhere—potentially IoT and wearable devices down the road.”
“We wouldn’t have been able to do this without BigQuery’s ability to analyze data. We’ve talked about developing differentiated learning for years. With machine learning, we can accomplish what we’ve always wanted to do.”
—David Vroonland, Superintendent of Schools, Mesquite Independent School DistrictGenerating recommendations for teaching styles and techniques
Mesquite ISD expects AYO to be fully operational for the 2022–2023 school year. Until then, Mesquite’s education and technology leaders are preparing AYO to ingest data. As of late 2020, the parents of 2,400 students have opted in to provide data points. Based on this data, and the identification of elements for student passions and aptitudes, AYO will generate a holistic overview of a students’ learning style and recommendations for which teaching styles and techniques best fit with each student’s profile.
Google Cloud and BigQuery are critical to AYO’s success. “We wouldn’t have been able to do this without BigQuery’s ability to analyze data,” Vroonland says. “With machine learning, we can accomplish what we’ve always wanted to do—develop tailored learning.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Mesquite ISD
The mission of Mesquite ISD is to develop an inspiring and innovative learning community that educates and empowers students to pursue excellence. The district serves nearly 39,000 students on 48 campuses.
About SoftServe
SoftServe is a digital advisor at the cutting-edge of technology—revealing, transforming, accelerating, and optimizing the way enterprises and software companies do business.