Industry
Education
Headquarters
Indianola, Mississippi
Company Size
1-10
About Equity Analytics
Founded in 2019 by Dylan Jones, the Mississippi based company, Equity Analytics, is aiding educators with making data-driven decisions through its high proficiency in automated data analysis. Equity Analytics started unofficially in Dylan Jones’s own classroom back in 2015, back when he was teaching middle school math and seeking out a way to make student performance data accessible and actionable. The idea began as just one excel spreadsheet, transfigured into a Google sheet, and finally evolved into a full fledged web app that is used regularly by teachers, principals, and district administrators from across the grid.
How does the app work?
Equity Analytics collects all of the data generated from students’ standardized test taking and presents various ways to interpret the student, class, and school performances. The Item Analysis Overview dashboard, for instance, considers the academic standard that the students were assessed on and generates the class, school, and district averages. The data appears in a color coded fashion to offer the teachers a foolproof way to analyze which areas they were successful in instructing the students and those that require improvement.
Another essential dashboard, nicknamed the “Christmas Tree Report” due to its red and green color scheme, presents the answers marked by students on a specific test. This allows teachers to see the specific questions that the majority of the students selected the wrong answers on (in some cases, the same wrong answer) and improve the teaching of that particular topic.
Often underpaid and working long hours, modern teachers consider the Equity Analytics’ app to be their best friend. Instead of going through tedious processes to try and figure out how to analyze all of their student performance data and how to implement their findings into practical ways, they can now rely on the app to execute this on their behalf, allowing them to focus on their true goal: educating their students.
The challenge
Within the field of education, students come and go and schedules change daily. In order to keep up with the ever-changing information, large sets of data need to be processed continuously. At first, Dylan was doing this work all by himself, manually: downloading and uploading files, committing code to handle changes, running the tasks to process the data, verifying data integrity, and then pushing it all to production. After employing this method every night for almost three months, he decided enough was enough and it was time to find a better way.
The solution
Dylan began to seek out an easy-to-use file transfer add-on on Heroku, the platform on which Equity Analytics runs, and came across SFTP To Go. “I like that it’s completely customizable and flexible, ultimately saving time and memory, and it plays well with all different types of file transfers. That’s really awesome because I can transfer files on my computer at home, my laptop on the road, or when I'm at work. I can have my assistant upload the files for me, it’s very easy”. Dylan Jones, founder. SFTP To Go gives Dylan and Equity Analytics room to focus on important goals through the automation of processes and prioritizing efficiency.
