Improve School Grants Management with Embedded Analytics

Introduction

Worldwide, many governments and their officials are devoted to increasing their national spending for education. These investments have increased access to academic materials, allowing many children to start school earlier and stay longer than ever before. However, government officials are experiencing challenges in distributing funds to schools, which has led to less improvement than is possible. Problems such as the poor assessment of school needs and the use of educational funds for activities unrelated to learning in some institutions have also contributed to poor improvement in learning.

Embedding analytics in an education department application helps monitor schools and government funding in dashboards. Officials can identify institutions where finances are most needed. A dashboard can also help determine whether grants distributed to schools were effective. In this blog post, I will give you a walkthrough of embedded analytics and how Bold BI^® can help a federal or provincial education department monitor the results of school funding and plan for the future:

• What is embedded analytics?
• Benefits of embedding a school improvement dashboard
• Bold BI's school improvement grant dashboard example
• How to embed analytics tools into government domain apps

What is embedded analytics?

Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application's user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application.

Benefits of embedding a school improvement dashboard

Embedded analytics allows education departments to monitor school improvement in relation to specific grants to determine their impact. This improves their understanding of what is working and where they still need to make investments to ensure that all institutions perform well. With a dashboard like this, leaders can track key indicators to guide them in making good decisions and distributing funds effectively. Let‘s see how embedded analytics helps government grant programs promote education through:

• Improving the performance of schools
• Better decision-making
• Effective grant management
• Easy monitoring of school grant results

Improving the performance of schools

Education is the key to success today. Embedded analytics helps governments ensure that their students are educated to decent standards. County or province education officials can track key indicators that give them insight into the current conditions of schools within their purview. They can identify schools that need extra support to achieve a given target and then consult administration and faculty to determine proper allocation of extra funding. Federal officials can track the the total special funding granted, grants by state, and exam score progress by state or school. Government officials can see the total amount of special funding set aside for the development of lowest-performing schools and compare the results of different development models and strategies. This helps them to perfect the effectiveness of grant spending to benefit the educations of as many students as possible.

Better decision-making

Embedded analytics helps education leaders to analyze information on schools and organize it more easily through sorting capabilities in dashboards. Being able to compare the financial needs of their schools at a glance like this lets them make well-informed decisions on distribution of the grants among the schools. Organizing schools in this objective way aids in eliminating bias in funding allocation.

Effective grant management

Today, education departments even at more local levels are responsible for overseeing many schools and are working hard to support them all. There is a great need to manage government resources so they are not wasted unnecessarily. Embedded analytics makes this possible by allowing the education department to examine school data not only to determine which schools are most in need, but which schools receiving grants are using them to the greatest gain. They can examine the effects of implementing different intervention models and more easily put together which factors cause models to succeed or fail at particular schools. This allows government resources to be used more effectively in the future. Schools without serious need, relatively, will not receive grants, while educational programs proven to work with specific school types and compositions can be implemented to greatest effect.

Easy monitoring of school grant results

Ministers of education need to monitor and keep proper records of government grants to gain knowledge on how to share them among schools in the future. There is also a need to monitor developments that school heads have made with the funds received to identify institutions with low growth rates and possible causes. Embedded analytics allows data from improvement grants to be tracked and schools to be classified by the their level of development, including both student performance and infrastructure. Understanding the real-time statuses of different schools and comparing those with their initial states to identify improvements made with the grants is easier with dashboard visuals.

Bold BI's school improvement grant dashboard example

School Improvement Grants Dashboard

Embedding a School Improvement Grants Dashboard in an education department app helps officials analyze the benefits of grants awarded to schools using metrics. This lets them come up with solutions for an equitable and rational distribution of grants in the future. This dashboard uses data from U.S. school systems.

Key metrics and KPIs

• Total amount granted
• Number of schools implementing each model
• Schools benefited
• Improvement Grants by Intervention Model
• Improvement grants by state
• Schools details by amount granted

Total Amount Granted

This card widget shows the total amount of grants issued to schools for improvement.

Number of Schools Implementing Each Intervention Model

This card widget displays the number of schools implementing each intervention model: transformation, turnaround, restart, and closure. It helps in categorizing schools based on their intervention model.

Schools Benefited

This card widget shows the number of schools that benefited from improvement grants.

Improvement Grants by Intervention Model

This pie chart shows improvement grants distribution by intervention model: transformation, turnaound, restart, and closure.

Improvement Grants by State

This chorolepth map shows the total grant money each state received. Monitoring this metric gives understanding of states that frequently receive higher amounts of resources than others.

School Details by Amount Granted

This grid shows the list of schools organized by the amount of money received.

To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the School Improvement Grants Dashboard demo.

How to embed analytics tools into government domain apps

Let's see how analytics can be embedded into government web applications. Bold BI can embed your dashboards in more than 18 web platforms, including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, and Vue with ASP.NET Core. In the rest of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into an Angular application.

Consider a scenario in which your government department has a website like the one shown in the following image.

You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.

Prerequisites

Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.

Step 1: Create an Angular application.
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, you first need to create an Angular application. Create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary TypeScript files to the project, as shown in the following image.

For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.

In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file, as shown in the following table and screenshot.

Properties	Property Value Descriptions
RootUrl	Bold BI dashboard server URL Example:https://localhost:58094/bi.
SiteIdentifier	For Bold BI, it should follow the format `site/site1`. For Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.
Environment	Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI, you should use `enterprise`.
apiHost	An ASP.NET Core application is run on https://localhost:5000/, which needs to be set as `apiHost`.

import { Component, Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import { Router, ActivatedRoute } from '@angular/router';
import { appService } from './app.service';
import { Item } from './app';

@Component({
    selector: 'app-root',
    templateUrl: './app.component.html',
    styleUrls: ['./app.component.css'],
    providers: [appService]
})

@Injectable()

export class AppComponent {

    //ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:61777/, which needs to be set as "apiHost"
    public apiHost = "http://localhost:5000";

    //Dashboard Server BI URL (ex: http://localhost:5000/, https://demo.boldbi.com/bi/)
    public rootUrl = "http://localhost:5000/bi";

    //For Bold BI Enterprise edition, it should be like 'site/site'. For Bold BI Cloud, it should be empty string.
    public siteIdentifier = "site/site1";

    //Url of the GetDetails action in ValuesController of the ASP.NET Core application
    public authorizationUrl = "/api/home/getdetails";

    //Url of the GetDashboards action in ValuesController of the ASP.NET Core application
    public getDashboardUrl = "/api/home/getdashboards";
    public baseUrl = "";
    public dashboardServerApiUrl = "";
    public dashboards: Item[];
    constructor(private _app: appService) {
    }
    ngOnInit() {
    }
}

Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance.
After the Angular web application is created, you need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server side (any web application) and the client side (Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.

Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server.
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users' email addresses, group data, and embed signatures. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI instance.

Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard.
In the Angular application, update the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can see that the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.

By following the previous steps, you can embed your dashboard into your Angular application.

To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.

Conclusion

Bold BI^® helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.

I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help government departments be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35 widgets and 150+ data sources.

Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free trial and create interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.