Spotlight is most widely known for its video reports. This year, as part of Pearson, we’ll produce unique video assessment reports for over 2.5 million students in nine states.

In some circles we’re known for our College and Career Readiness Guides, providing targeted post-graduation guidance in some of the nation’s largest and most diverse districts.

But more broadly, what we hope the education community will understand about Spotlight’s technology — and our philosophy — is that we make it possible to communicate personally with students, parents, and educators — through infographics, video, personally-addressed articles, even PowerPoint presentations.

Graphics and native-spoken voice overs and animation are the face of the Spotlight platform, but automated analysis is the brain, rapidly making decisions and enabling mass personalization.

For every new report, we write business rules — questions that we “ask” of the data. Dozens of them. Our software does what a skilled human analyst would do: answers those questions, with easy-to-understand text and graphics, assembled into a comprehensive profile. (Actually, the software does what an army of analysts would do, all working simultaneously to produce hundreds of reports in a minute.)

But here’s the real power of the Spotlight brain, automated analysis: those virtual analysts are also like dedicated consultants, as every new report is custom-designed for a client. We ask our clients: What questions do you believe this report should answer? After all, the educators we partner with are the pedagogical experts; we simply enable massive, rapid scaling of their expertise.

Of course, we know from thousands of parents we’ve heard from that Spotlight’s reports aren’t just informative, but motivating as well; the tone of these reports encourages students and families to take action to pursue new opportunities and attain new levels of learning. So maybe our automated analysis engine isn’t the brain of our software; those smarts come from the experts we partner with. Maybe it’s really the heart of what we do.