Birmingham Metropolitan College (BMET) is rolling out business intelligence dashboard software from Dynistics, which will empower its students to take ownership of their work and success by being able to monitor their own progress as they go.

The Active Dashboards software which provides users with a real-time graphical representation of college and student data, is being used by the college's management team in the first instance - following which it is to be rolled out to departmental heads, other college staff, and ultimately to its 25,000 learners.

"The aim is to empower our students to be able to monitor their own progression on their chosen course by being able to access Active Dashboards to see how they're performing against their own target grades, as well as against other learners," explains Paul Cornick, director of corporate strategy, Birmingham Metropolitan College.

"Ultimately, the learners' success is our success and we want to foster this 'ownership' approach. Active Dashboards is the ideal tool with which the learners can understand better their performance and take leadership with regards to their learning objectives."

The dashboard software is supporting the college in build on its current ways of working to become more sophisticated in terms of accessing, analysing and using its data; trends that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, are now very evident and easier to act upon when plotted in a highly graphical format for all to see.

"The data is critical and is helping us to be more sophisticated in the way we manage the college; we know this can be emulated by the students when they are given access to the technology in the way they manage their own work and success during their time here," explains Paul Cornick.

"We chose Active Dashboards because it is so intuitive - and that's going to be extremely important when we consider the diversity of users we have planned to use it with. It has to be user friendly, engaging and provide the information the user needs at the click of a mouse -that's exactly what it does.

"We considered six dashboard software providers and Dynistics was by far the most user friendly - we could see the students and teaching staff being able to use it with very little training required at all."

Anthony Dent, managing director, Dynistics comments: "Given its highly respected reputation as an innovator in the college sector, we are particularly delighted that BMET has joined the rapidly growing number of UK colleges that are adopting Active Dashboards software to assist in making the right operational decisions".

"Our unique approach includes an implementation model that helps us to create a real return on investment for colleges, both in terms of short-term productivity gains and in supporting its long-term strategic aims."