All About Attendance: See What's New at our Upcoming Product Hunt Launch!

Blog
August 31, 2022

We here at Virtually have made some major strides since going through the first remote batch of Y Combinator and raising our seed round (led by Tiger Global) in 2020.

Throughout 2022, we’ve been laser focused on giving your team access to game changing insights by aggregating extremely detailed student data from across all your tools.

We’re thrilled to showcase everything we’ve built in TODAY's Product Hunt Launch!

What are we most excited about this time around? We've cracked the code on attendance tracking, offering join times, leave times, and attendance duration whether or not students are even logged into Zoom. This is truly the most granular attendance data around.

We’d truly love your support. Check out our Product Hunt Launch page where you can learn more about our latest release and take advantage of our Product Hunt Launch promo.

If you want to keep up with all things Virtually, we encourage you to sign up for our newsletter here.

Curious how far we’ve come? Here’s a brief overview of Virtually’s past, present, and future:

We started out building the first-ever lightweight LMS to support online cohort-based learning programs. With backend features (event management, attendance tracking) and student-facing features (knowledge base, discussion board, assignment submission, payment processing), our goal was to be the all-in-one tool for online educators. An online school in a box.

We soon realized that building an all-in-one tool made it way harder for users to customize their experience. Not to mention that there were already tons of great LMS’s out there that already offered top tier student experiences.

We decided to double down on what we already knew was our secret sauce: backend management for online learning programs.

We pivoted to an admin-only tool, the Virtual Event Manager, focused on streamlining and automating event creation and auto-tracking attendance data and survey feedback.

We saw first-hand just how powerful having super accurate, easily exportable attendance data really was for online schools. At that point it was clear: attendance data was just the tip of the iceberg.

With all the digital footprints of online learning programs - LMS, Community Tools like Slack or Discord, etc., we imagined what online learning programs could do if they were able to easily collect and aggregate student data from across their different toolsets.

With this data at hand, the possibilities for providing game-changing student support exploded. What if programs could use this data to auto-flag at-risk students based on indicators related to their specific program? What if programs could intervene with an at-risk student before they dropped off? What if online schools could make data-informed decisions to improve their overall student experience?

That’s where we are today. Building the first-ever Student Relationship Manager (SRM). And just like a top learning program, we’re sure to follow our ABC’s - pulling and tracking data for Attendance, Behavior, and Coursework - to give online learning programs the full picture of the student journey. We've learned from speaking with hundreds of online learning programs that these ABCs are the key metrics to determining which students are on track and which are at risk of churn.

Through all of Virtually's journey, our goal has always been to build technology that helps online education be better for students and admins alike. We can’t wait to see what the future has in store.

Got questions about Virtually? Schedule a call to connect with our team.

Read Next: How to Track Attendance & Engagement for your Online Learning Program

Laura Marks

Laura Marks is Head of Customer Experience at Virtually