Power BI is Microsoft’s interactive “business intelligence” data visualization software product. We spoke to Victoria Lucas, head of English and mathematics at Bishop Burton College about how they are integrating CENTURY data across their vocational courses.

Since we implemented CENTURY, our English and mathematics lecturers have been consistently using the data available on the platform to inform their teaching. That’s been very useful for them, but as a Further Education college we need more than just successful English and mathematics departments - we need to embed the core subjects throughout the whole college. We know that when students are confident with English and mathematics, it reflects positively in their progress in their vocational course as well.

To achieve that, we needed to find a way to succinctly integrate English and mathematics skills into all subjects. We recently started to use Power BI to ensure that the lecturers in vocational subjects have access to all of the data they need to do this effectively.

Power BI stitches together the vocational subjects with the English and mathematics data from CENTURY, meaning that subject lecturers don’t have to spend time collating all of that information manually. This is particularly useful for us given that our vocational lecturers don’t use the platform themselves.

Using Power BI, lecturers can see how many students are studying a particular course, for example Animal Management Level 1, how they’re getting on with their course both as a cohort and individually, and how they’re progressing with English and mathematics on the platform. 

This has been absolutely fantastic for us so far in terms of bridging the gaps between the core subjects and the vocational areas, and I think other colleges would definitely benefit from using Power BI to do the same.

So, how does Power BI actually work? We spoke with Stephen Shepherd, IT Project and Integration Analyst to find out. 

Step 1: Preparing the data

To start with, I pulled together all of the data that is important to us for this report from various sources. This will vary from institution to institution depending on what data is captured and where it is stored, but for us at Bishop Burton, we wanted to include data from our timetabling system, our MIS and from CENTURY. 

Once I had imported all of the data from these sources to Power Query Editor, which is where you initially import and transform (clean) data before producing visuals, I started to stitch it together. 

To do this, I created a master dataset. In simple terms, this involved merging the CENTURY scores with our MIS and Attendance data, connected by student reference number, as this is a unique value. This unlocked the door to our MIS, allowing me to access any of the fields from there that we wanted to be able to filter by, for example age range, curriculum area, whether students are full or part time and so on. 

You have to be quite careful at this stage with merging the data to ensure that you don't end up with duplicate records and so on, but this shouldn’t be a problem for anyone who regularly works with data. There’s also quite a bit you can do to clean the data up. For example, our MIS data goes back four years, but we don’t need all of that, so I stripped that out to just show this year’s data set. 

Step 2: Using Power BI Desktop 

Once I’d set this up, I moved over to Power BI Desktop. Here I could see all of the data sets I’d built and choose how to visualize each piece of information. For example as a bar chart, pie chart or geomap. Similarly to Excel, there are tabs along the bottom so I could split up all of the visuals into related groupings, for example ‘nugget data’ or ‘average score’. 

This Average Score screenshot below shows a drilldown page allowing staff to get all the way down the student level and individual nugget level scores.

The Scores are then colour RAG rated so that staff can identify strengths and weaknesses. Equally, as a Manager or SLG, you can drill at a much higher level and see how Courses, Curriculum areas and even Sites are doing. Additionally, filters have been added to allow mathematics and English lecturers to be split out.

Step 3: Upload to a Report Server

I then uploaded this to a Power BI Report Server. There are two versions of this: an on-premise reports service and a cloud-based version. Below is an example of one of the tabs on the on-premise version. It is now embedded in a web page that can be accessed by any member of staff, via a series of access permissions.

For example, an Academic Head of Area could easily take a look at the screen below to see how their area is getting on on CENTURY. On this particular tab, they can see ‘Nuggets Ranked by Average Score’ filtered not only by their specific curriculum area, but also by things like age range, gender and campus.

On another tab, they can view a Geomap - which is useful for us given that we have two campuses and our students are spread across the country - and on another tab, they can see the number of nuggets attempted by students in their curriculum area and how many hours they have spent on the platform, and so on. 

The reason that there are so many tabs is because there is just too much information available to display on one page - there are pretty much limitless combinations you could look up!

Additional Features on the Cloud

On the cloud-based version, you can see all of the information you would be able to see on the on-premise version along with some very useful additional features. 

A key benefit is that you can build a Personal Dashboard. You do this by pre-filtering and then ‘pinning’ the resulting visuals from multiple pages/tabs into one personal, central location. Each staff member can easily view all of the data that is important to them whenever they look on their dashboard without having to search across all the tabs and set the correct tab and filters whenever you log in to Power BI.  In effect, all of the dashboard reports, tabs and visuals become a ‘repository’ as opposed to a single huge PowerBI report. Staff can ‘shop around’ to pick what they need and add it to their own dashboard, and the data will always keep up with the source data from which they pinned it.

Our Future Plans

Ultimately, we aim to have all staff using PowerBI dashboards. We use them across the College, not just for academic purposes.

We envisage staff building their own personal dashboards, based on the master dashboards I produce. Getting them embedded into their quality cycles. Using them to share and discuss with their staff and other teams inside the College.

Microsoft Teams also has an embedded feature which allows reports to be loaded into Teams spaces when on calls enabling swift and efficient collaboration. The vision is to have this seamlessly integrated into the set of tools we offer our staff.

Learn more here about how CENTURY is helping FE colleges to supercharge their teaching and learning.

Book a demo to find out more about the courses, or speak to your Account Manager if you are an existing customer for more information.