Automations in Cortex Workspaces

Fragmented, limited tools and data frameworks compel needless delays and manual action in outreach activities that affect school success.

With Cortex’s Automations feature, high-level administration staff can customize, schedule and monitor automated outreach campaigns from easy to use templates. They can target these to their staff and students based on important events in Enrollment, Retention, Placement, and Compliance scenarios that will allow customers to initiate effective dialogues about student engagement faster.

Access Automations

Automations screens are accessible to Cortex customers from the workspaces’ new left-hand navigation placement and the Workspace’s secondary top bar.

1. The Automations landing screen shows top-level metrics for live automations which can be filtered.
   1. The Activity table below the top-level metrics area shows records of users who have qualified to receive a message from an Automation (a user who has received more than one automation instance will appear multiple times for each instance).
   2. The table can be searched by name and filtered to show only those instances that have been Opened, Clicked or neither (None), and enables drill-down to individual recipients profiles from each record.
      1. Note: Push Notifications may be more than once if a single user is logged into CourseKey on more than one type of mobile device. In this scenario, the activity table will only log a single entry.

Templated & Configurable Automations

Templated and configurable automations exist per workspace:

1. To review, create and edit individual automations, click the View All Automations button. Cortex customers will be see a list of preconfigured Automations that are set to OFF (as shown via a switch in gray below, e.g. the First Day of Class Reminder) in the UI on the Automations list screen:
   
   
   
   
2. Templated automations for Phase 1 will be scripted in late June, and include:
   1. Enrollment:
      1. Day 1 Attendance Reminder
      2. Day 1 Attendance Missed
      3. Day 1 Attendance Congratulations
   2. Retention:
      1. Attendance Threshold Warning
      2. Academic Threshold Warning (assumes grades data source)
      3. LAR > 7 Days Warning
      4. New Severe-Risk Students Daily Alert (Not in Automations List – accessible via Retention Settings for v1)
         
3. Trigger events are re-usable across workspaces.
   1. Time-based: Sends either as a simple one-time message or a scheduled- or counted-recurrence reminder
   2. Event-based: Sends based on a described set of trigger attributes and conditions are checked daily (or more frequently as noted) to build the qualifying recipient list.
      
      
4. Trigger attributes can be used to conditionalize beyond just the event level and dictate to whom the automation might apply:
   1. Day 1 attendance: Did the student check in to the first course / start date (yes or no).
   2. Attendance Percentage: What is the student’s percentage of hours attended vs. the total expected (note the state of this data varies by attendance type)
   3. Academic Percentage: Out of a total of 100, what is the student’s average percentage of score attained (completed assignments only - late assignments that are null/not explicitly scored as ‘0’ are not counted)
   4. Last Activity Recorded: The date CK last recorded a tracked activity by the student
      
   5. Checklist Risk Score: Based on the amount of time the student has been Active in the program, are they completing checklist items at the expected pace?
   6. Checklist Progress: Has the student completed a certain % of expected submissions on a single specific checklist or entire program?
      
      
5. Where applicable, trigger conditions modify what the automation does in terms of when it sends or who it excludes from receiving. Basic examples of conditions and values include:
   1. Schedule recurrence
   2. Is / is Not Null
   3. Values (days/hours) +/-
      
      

Editing, targeting or creating an Automation

1. Any of the templated automations can be activated directly on the Automations list by clicking the switch to ON (which will turn it green). New customers should review the templated content before doing so - click anywhere on the title content for the row that represents the desired automation to review.
   
   
   
   
2. After selecting the type of automation, trigger and conditions that apply, click Save to advance to specify the action and content of the automation message:
   
   
3. Automations may be targeted to any of the following 3 types of users of CourseKey:
   1. All users that meet the conditions/trigger specified (inclusive of staff)
   2. Only students that meet the conditions/triggers specified
   3. Only the staff specified in a picklist (below)
      1. Near-term future improvement: All selected by default, no ability to select/de-select all
         
         
4. Automations may be delivered via any of 3 channels: Email (any staff or student user), or SMS (where a phone number exists for the user), and Push Notification (students only).
   1. Email contents will be managed with a ‘WYSIWYG’ editor (button to make text bold, embed images and images, etc) - not currently in staging as-of June 9.
   2. CourseKey reports Engagement with an automated message regardless of channel as Opened, Clicked or None. The detailed definitions of whether we log an Open or Click depend on the message and channel particulars.
      1. For example, with Opened, Email will track with a clear 1x1 tracking pixel that fires when the email is opened, whereas SMS will be considered Opened only if an included link has also been Clicked.
      2. Push Notifications: For automations via this channel, multiple-device users on iOS and Android are expected to show as multiple rows / instances for a given send IF the user has gotten the notification on multiple (logged-in) devices.
   3. Note: We cannot report on whether an automation does not deliver, only that no action was taken. In some cases, it may be due to the lack of a phone number in CourseKey, or whether a student has the CourseKey app with Push Notifications permitted. Enhancements to visibility in this area are expected, but in certain cases full visibility of the reason an automation was never seen by an audience member cannot be known.
      
      
5. A review step appears at the end of the flow to confirm all settings and content for the automation you are about to save.
   
   
6. To create a new automation, users with Write permissions can click the green “+ Automation” button on the Automations List page. The process will follow the same screen flow as editing an Automation shown above.