I am the Chief Technology and Product Officer for Faria Education Group. Since I joined Faria in April of last year, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with many of our schools. I’ve listened as you’ve shown me how our products make your lives easier and I’ve benefited from your insights and suggestions.
I’ve even been happy when you’ve shared your frustrations, because that helps me understand where we need to improve. Your feedback is invaluable in shaping what comes next.
We hear you. We know there are areas where we can improve. I want to personally share our vision for the Faria product family. While you may not see everything change overnight, we’re committed to continuous improvement.
There are several themes that shape our thinking, as we plan the future of our products. I’ll discuss a few of those here (and circle back to this topic in the future).
One of our strategic goals is to provide an integrated suite of SaaS offerings to help schools operate more effectively. Our focus is primarily with information about students and learning, covering the students’ entire journey through a school. We start with the initial outreach to potential student and their families (through OpenApply’s CRM capability) and tracking the student through application and enrollment. We then look after the student’s experience in the school, including classroom learning, extracurricular and co-curricular activities, attendance, assessments, transportation, and more.
Historically, Faria has offered individual point products, without enough integration among them. We’re starting to change that and we expect to make continual (but gradual) progress. We recognize that many of our products have different user communities: the admissions team that uses OpenApply is mostly separate from the teachers and students who use ManageBac+. The Activities Coordinators and sports team coaches who use SchoolsBuddy are yet another community. As a result, we’re not going to try to create an all-in-one solution that tries to do everything. However, we do plan to bring our products more closely together and ensure that data exchange among them is smooth and easy.
Finally, we recognize that no school will get all of its software from Faria, even those who embrace all of our products. We need to fit into a complex technology ecosystem that is different for every school. To achieve that and to help you meet your unique needs, we’re expanding our commitment to delivering open solutions that integrate nicely with your other products, whether that’s a Student Information System (like PowerSchool or iSAMS), a large free (or nearly free) suite like Google Classroom or Microsoft Education, or a home-grown tool that is proprietary to you.
Data is the key to better understanding what’s happening (and what could happen) in your school. Within our Faria products, we have lots of data: information about students, applications, enrollment, classes, lessons, curricula, assessments, attendance, extracurricular activities, transportation, and more. Other systems that you use (like an SIS or a finance system) have even more data. As a central part of our product strategy, we are committed to help you unlock that data, to gain insights that help you improve the educational outcomes of your students or increase the effectiveness of how you run your schools. We’ll do that, whether the data you need is in a Faria product or in the data of some other system.
We all want to use AI to improve the educational experiences we deliver. Every software vendor is talking about conversational AI (or generational AI) and every school is already on its own journey to embrace these exciting new technologies. However, there are some wrong ways to do this and at Faria, we are committed to help you avoid that path.
Our implementation of AI-based features in our products will always follow several key principles. Most importantly, we will ensure that your data remains safe and secure (in compliance with local legal requirements, wherever you are). In addition, we will ensure that the results that come back from the AI engines have appropriate filtering and screening to ensure that inappropriate content is blocked (especially when that output might be visible to students). Finally, we are convinced that AI is not a feature and we don’t charge schools for “our AI”. AI is a tool that we use to build features that deliver value for you. If those features have enough value (and are optional), then we may ask you to pay for the value that they bring, but we won’t add an “AI fee” to our price list.
This blog will be a regular series, where I’ll share my thoughts and insights. I’ll talk about where Faria’s products are going and what technology trends are shaping education. If you have reactions to something I write, I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you have ideas or suggestions for topics I should address, please let me know. If you’d like to set up a conversation, reach out and we’ll try to arrange that.
I look forward to sharing this journey with you!
Daryl Orts
Chief Technology and Product Officer
Faria Education Group
daryl@faria.org
