Frequently Asked Questions

When you are ready to begin using Alpine services, you can get started right away. The speed with which you can begin loading and using your output depends on the measures you want to use. For measures already set up in the system, your results are usable immediately.

Alpine is web-based and is available 24-7-365.

Alpine contracts are set up on an annual subscription basis. Our year begins July 1, but if it is springtime and you are ready to get started for the following school year, we will want to turn on the system before July, so you have data loaded and are ready to begin using the tools in earnest before school starts.

Both. Many measures already are set up and all you need to do is activate those. For locally developed measures, we are happy to set those up for you too. Once you know what you are doing, we will show you how to set up measures on your own if you are interested.

No. Several clients load a file containing student courses and grades, but Alpine is not a gradebook program per se.

Daily assignments are most informative if they are scored on a common rubric so they can be summarized over time. While a measure can be set up easily to accomplish this, our clients generally don't choose to enter daily assignments.

Almost all Alpine clients are school districts. Some charter schools work with us independently.

Alpine works with over 100 school districts plus dozens of charter schools in 8 states.

Alpine was formed in 2001. Our client base has grown every year.

We can't predict the future, but in the last 5 years, while we have expanded the services we offer, our pricing has not changed. Please complete the price quote form so we can generate a custom quote for your organization.

Some clients prefer to pay for services for several years at once. Our contracts are usually for a single year, but please let us know if a multi-year contract better meets your needs.

Alpine works with data after a test has been administered. The data can be entered by hand or uploaded if an electronic file already exists. We are not a test generator or item banking program.

Alpine works with clients in several states, and the list is growing. If we are not already working with your state's test results, we will have you send us some data from your student files so your state can also be included. Many assessments (such as those in the data warehouse and many student plans) are not state specific, so even if we need to set up some new files for you, there will be a lot that looks familiar.

At the student level, a student's history can be viewed across all measures in the student's Portfolio report. You also can see these on the student's dedicated page within each measure. At the group level, frequently, there are reports designed to display data over time both in a cross-sectional and quasi-longitudinal formats.

As long as we have file specifications for your older data, you are welcome to load as much history as you wish.

Data collection processes vary from one client to another, but we follow this general guideline. If a datafile comes from a vendor in a useable electronic format already, we would like you to upload those data from their original source files. For measures that have been collected by hand or typed into a spreadsheet or database previously, you will probably be well served to migrate toward direct entry into Alpine for these measures. This guideline minimizes your extra steps and maximizes data accuracy.

You can load your district and school logos onto the website and these will appear on the website itself and also on student and summary reports. You also customize the site by activating the specific measures administered in your organization.

The tools are designed to be used by district and school administrators, teachers, as well as technical staff and accountability teams. The focus of the tools is on progress over time across many measures for individual students and groups of students.

It is possible to set up a permission profile that allows for summary level access on the measures you designate without being able to identify individual students.

Alpine demonstrations usually occur over the phone. We have found that the most effective demonstrations involve one of our staff on a speaker phone while you are logged in to the site and we walk through a demonstration account together. We prefer this to a WebEx-type presentation, so that you can navigate the site in real time. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader and Excel for the demo.

Sample reports are posted on the website for state assessments, data warehouse, and student plans. A video tour of the tools and accompanying slides also are posted.

We are adding teacher identifiers to our user characteristics. If your state uses teacher identifiers, these will become a part of the user setup. This will assist you in making teacher class groups and using your data to evaluate teacher effectiveness.

There are three general ways that people generally need to organize their data:

• according to a point in time (e.g., currently enrolled students, students who took a particular test at a certain time, etc.),
• according to a grouping of students whom you select (such as students in a class), and
• according to a demographic characteristic (e.g., students enrolled for at least 2 years, special education students, students with an active RTI plan). Grouping and organizing students is easy and dynamic. Once you create or choose a group, you can run any of your reports from that perspective - individual student reports, summaries, spreadsheets, etc.

Not a problem. The relevant measures in the data warehouse and Student Plans can be activated in your account while we set up the specific assessments for your state. Every state-required assessment has its own file format, record inclusion rules, and ways of reporting, so we will have several questions. We will also incorporate relevant external information such as state totals into the setup.

There is no charge for phone and email support. Our tech support staff will help you set up and manage your system and also will teach you how to do these functions independently.

End users should go through their main district contact(s) to get help with Alpine. To assist you, we have many videos, support documents, and an interactive Q&A posted on the website. It is important that your end users involve you in their questions, so you are always in the loop regarding the needs of your users.

An Alpine staff member can come to your location to conduct a training on site if you wish. We also offer summer user conferences, designed mostly for administrative users. There are over a dozen videos posted on the website as well, which also can help with your training needs. And, of course, you can always call or email with your specific needs.

We offer phone and Email tech support during regular business hours plus videos, and a Q&A tool always available. We also offer in-person trainings at your location or ours.

If the scanner produces an electronic file, it probably can be loaded into Alpine. We will want to take a look at your output to make sure that adequate information identifying the student is included in the file and that the file is in a readable flat file format.

There are many ways to progress monitor. Sometimes progress monitoring data is embedded in downloaded files, but some progress monitoring data are collected by the teacher and are not in an electronic file. For those instances, the RTI plan includes a section specifically for progress monitoring data.

Each state is a little different. The state assessments generally include measures such as the: state standards assessment, ELL assessment, alternate assessment, growth model calculations, graduation/exit exams.

The Data Warehouse is for other locally-selected measures. Usually, this includes a combination of large-scale measures, curriculum-based measures, and locally designed measures. Typically, some data are uploaded from external files and others are entered directly into the system.

Student Plans are a place to pull together scores from throughout the system and supporting narrative around a specific topic such at RTI, ELL, gifted, etc. They are sometimes updated annually, but often are monitored regularly throughout the year.

When you review a design for a particular student plan that is already set up in Alpine, you may want to include certain fields but not others. Full permission users can opt in and out of various fields within a plan design. Or, we can always set up a completely new version to meet your needs.

Alpine has a user friendly interface that allows any user to create their own spreadsheets. No programmer needed.

Our clients' data warehouse setup usually includes a mix of large-scale measures, curriculum-based measures, and locally developed measures. You can send us samples of what you would like to collect, and we can determine if there will be a cost to set up the measures. Unless the setup is particularly involved, there is usually no charge for setting up measures.

Many measures include optional fields that a client may choose to include or not include in their version of a measure.

State tests have evolved since NCLB began. New ones were added, others were changed, or disappeared. As states design their own versions of their new assessments in the coming years, we will continue to support them.

Sure. Documents/files can be attached to a plan easily.

Yes. We have a Classes/Grades setup for this purpose. This allows users to analyze grading patterns and to look at relationships between course taking/grades and achievement on other measures.

Too many to list here! We have over 140 standard measures set up in Data Warehouse plus over 400 custom setups for specific clients. If a measure you use is not among those already in the system, we are happy to take a look at it and see what it will take to set it up.

Alpine has over 25 plan designs set up, everything from RTI and ELL to Literacy Plans and plans to document a student's eligibility and use of accommodations. Plans can be designed very specifically to meet a state's requirements (including the design of output to match state forms) or they can be flexible with many optional fields that can be included or excluded at the discretion of the client.

Absolutely! Alpine's student portfolio report summarizes all of the data in the system for any given student. On this report, you can set a date range to include all records or only the most recent records, such as the last year or two. Portfolio reports can be generated for one student at a time, or looped to produce all of them for a group of students at once, such as for a teacher's class.

Any field in the Current Student File or in a measure can be designated as "restricted." User permissions (controlled by the client) determine which users are able to access restricted fields. As an extra layer of security, even a user who has access to restricted fields, must actively choose to display them in their output.

Data security is of utmost importance. There are several choices that each client makes regarding data security - Who should be able to access the tools? Which students and which measures should each user be able to access? How usernames and passwords are structured? Which users should have view only versus edit access? Will you set automatic inactivity timeouts for users? We are happy to assist you in these important discussions and help you set up the system to meet your requirements.

You own your data. Alpine manages, stores, analyzes, reports, and distributes your data in the ways you designate.

FERPA requires that you protect the identities of students. This rule applies even when the student is not named, especially when it can be deduced based on his/her demographic characteristics. Summarizing on larger groups of students helps to protect the identities of individual students. One of the permission settings allows you to control which users are able to run summary reports based on small groups of students Users who have the ability to run small population-based summaries, also can run the same report based on a larger minimum group size, making it easy to generate a report for internal use and for a public setting.

The student demographics in your student file are up to you. Of course, you will want to include standards such as gender, ethnicity, and birthdate. Others frequently included are enrollment date, IEP, ELL, Lunch Status, GT, etc. The student demographics setup page is flexible, so you can define demographics to meet your local needs.

Yes, Alpine has an electronic records transfer process in which clients may choose to participate. With the agreement of both the sending and receiving client, when a student moves from one district to another, the data can follow the student to their new school.

We host your data in a secure data center. There is no need to purchase or maintain servers on your end.

The tools are web-based so there is no special software to install. All reasonably recent browsers for PC and Mac will work. You will need Excel and Adobe Acrobat Reader to generate spreadsheets and PDF reports. You also might appreciate having a video viewer to watch the videos posted on the site.

Small updates are made to the site regularly without an interruption in service. Larger updates are done after hours, and still, almost never with down time.

Our uptime is well over 99% for each year we have been in business.

Tech support is available by phone and email M-F 8:00AM - 5:00PM Mountain Time.

Yes, we have redundant systems continuously backing up your data.

Electronic data files contain information such as the student name, ID number, school, grade, date of birth, etc. These characteristics help the system to identify which records belong with each student. Setting up electronic data files well prior to testing pays off in good, quality record matching when the data are uploaded. Records that do not match to the correct student can be moved to the correct student after they are loaded.

Our clients work with a number of different SIS systems. PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Go Edustar, and Skyward are some of the more popular ones. If you can generate a text or Excel file export from your SIS, it is likely that it can be loaded into Alpine.

Many clients have set up automated downloads from their SIS system into Alpine. Automated downloads can be scheduled to occur daily, weekly, or at another interval you choose.

Alpine is not a data warehouse shell within which you need several programmers to set up and manage the file specifications and reports for each measure. We do most of that for you. You will have some decisions to make regarding how you want users, permissions, and measures set up and we will help you think through those choices. After your initial setup, the maintenance is minimal.

If the student moves from one school to another within your organization, the data follows them automatically. When a student moves between school districts, if both districts are Alpine clients, then you can send an electronic copy of the records to the new district with just a few clicks.

Yes. Permission Profiles determine many aspects of the user experience, including which students the user is able to see.

Reports are ready immediately.

Data in Alpine can be exported to a standard spreadsheet, PDF graphical summary report, PDF graphical report for an individual student, and individual student narrative report (for Student Plans). Spreadsheets can be generated for a single measure and also across multiple measures in a single spreadsheet (no programmer required). Additionally, some measures have student reports that can be generated printing on 2"x4" labels.

Data files can be loaded from .CSV and tab-delimited text files. Some measures are set up for automated imports from a test vendor's website. Each measure is set up specifically to match the file format of the source data. In addition, data can be entered by hand for an individual student or for a group of students using a multi-student entry interface.

We offer several 1-day User's Conferences in the summer where people come together to refresh their skills and where we like to debut new functions in the system. This is a great place to meet other users with similar interests and to get new ideas!