The Customer
Named one of the top childcare franchises in the United States, Goddard Schools is a vast network of schools serving over 90,000 students. The quality of their teaching is a top priority. To honor their educators, they have an annual “Teacher of the Year” award program, where faculty and parents can nominate outstanding teachers in their Goddard communities. Previously, this process involved collecting and manually evaluating thousands of feedback submissions across different regions. The feedback ranged from written essays to video submissions, all of which were evaluated on specific grading criteria.
The Opportunity
The evaluation process had historically been quite time-consuming, as it relied on a third-party vendor manually reviewing over 7,000 submissions. From those thousands, Goddard was given the top 48 options and from there narrowed it down to their “Teacher of the Year.”
This approach took several weeks, given the very nature of the varied submissions and the different criteria required to score them.
Goddard wanted a solution that would help automate and standardize the evaluation process, ensuring a faster, more objective, and scalable approach to selecting their “Teacher of the Year.”
This was an opportunity for dbSeer to provide guidance and ensure these objectives were met.
The Solution
At dbSeer, our technology is designed to serve you and help you achieve your impact. We utilize cutting-edge technologies to help you achieve your goal.
We decided to do just that with Goddard. dbSeer leveraged the extensive data processing capabilities offered by AWS Glue to empower educators at Goddard Schools, ultimately identifying the “Teacher of the Year” in the process.
Goddard provided dbSeer with the data, with thousands of essay responses and video recordings from across their franchise network. AWS Glue became the backbone of our data processing pipeline, orchestrating the entire workflow from raw data ingestion to structured output.
AWS Glue job was created to ingest the audio/video feedback recordings and send them to Transcribe for transcription. The clean, structured data from the Glue pipeline was then fed into Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet Large Language Model (LLM) using AWS Bedrock. The LLM used the grading criteria to sift through and provide scoring in a consistent and unbiased way. The processed and standardized data were then stored in an AWS Aurora database for reporting needs.
Empowering the AI with these AWS data processing capabilities helped eliminate the judgment variability that naturally occurs between different human evaluators, ensuring more consistent and fair assessment. This helped provide an approachable and less overwhelming process for Goddard to choose their “Teacher of the Year.”
The Architecture Diagram
The Results
By leveraging the power of AWS Glue and next-gen technology, we transformed Goddard Schools’ Teacher of the Year selection process.
We were able to turn a weeks-long evaluation process into one that can be completed within hours. AWS Glue’s serverless architecture automatically scaled to handle the annual surge of over 7,000 submissions without any manual intervention. The AWS-empowered process enables objective scoring, providing a level playing field for grading.
The AWS Glue Data Catalog now offers previously untapped potential for the information it receives. The data is now structured and stored for future reporting, which can help Goddard analyze future trends if desired. This allows opportunities for better reporting and year-over-year comparisons, further empowering their educators.
Key improvements achieved:
- Processing time reduced from weeks to just a few hours
- Consistent data quality through Glue’s built-in validation
- Scalable pipeline handling larger volumes of information in a seamless way
Goddard Schools emphasized the positive engagement with dbSeer: “dbSeer was an exceptional partner, taking the time to deeply understand our needs and delivering a solution that exceeded expectations.” ~Danika Brown, Director, Brand Marketing & Creative Services, The Goddard Schools
Let data drive your impact. Connect with dbSeer today to empower your employees with faster, fairer solutions powered by AWS Glue—just like Goddard did.
