The Ultimate Guide to Airtable in the Education Industry

The Best Education Use-case Examples for Airtable

We here at BuiltOnAir truly believe that the use-cases for Airtable are unlimited. Anyone with an idea can surely use Airtable’s versatile capabilities to mold it to their needs. Below we’ve listed some use-cases we’ve found but you can check out these two great articles written by teachers for others in the Education industry here and here.

Using Airtable to create Study Guides and track Homeschool Course Curriculum

As a student, whether in high school, undergraduate, or graduate school, it is extremely important to have a place to keep notes, testing and exam dates, and important class information. Airtable is the all-in-one solution that can keep you organized and help make studying a bit easier and hopefully less stressful. Using Airtable to create study guides and keep track of the course curriculum is an excellent solution to managing class workloads. Utilizing the views, blocks, and calendar features can pull the data you need in front of you in seconds. This template made by the Airtable team is a great example of tracking what knowledge you know and what you need to work on still. These two bases were created for homeschooling and used for tracking curriculum being used and to track independent study for courses. Both these bases show how simple the process of using Airtable can be and how it can transform your data to work for your needs.

Creating a course syllabus and tracking course information in Airtable

As a teacher, having a well planned out schedule and a place to track important information is key to ensuring a successful school year.  By utilizing Airtable’s extremely flexible and versatile platform, you can make sure all your important data is in one place, exactly the way you need it to be. Using Airtable to create course syllabuses and schedules will help save you time and relieve some pressure on your already busy and full workloads. Since Airtable sees data as relational, all your course documents, lesson plans, resources, and additional tools can be stored together in one place and shown to you with the click of a button. See this example of a course syllabus base used for planning projects, compiling media resources, and speakers for the class. This template base helps track course scheduling from the administrative side, allowing you to see course offerings, catalog descriptions, course numbers and more.

Using Airtable during your college application process

It’s no secret that applying to undergrad and graduate schools and programs requires a lot of attention to detail. Usually, there are a lot of requirements that need to be met and applications that need to be filled out. By utilizing Airtable to organize these important requirements and deadlines can make applying for education programs a breeze. Inputting program requirements, due dates, and tracking communication between programs in Airtable can help sort out what can sometimes be an overwhelming process. This Grad School Applications template is a perfect example of how to use the tool to track your application process. Another great base on tracking college applications made by a student that tracks applications for different schools, scholarship applications, and the many due diligence tasks that need to be completed.

School Fundraising using Airtable

Being a part of any school, as a student or staff member, you are bound to run into a School Fundraiser. Fundraising for your school is a huge part of building an excellent environment for your school community that will last for future students and teachers. Whether your goal is to raise money for new gym equipment, create funds for a class field trip, or to sell those oh-so-delicious cookies that seem to make their way around once a year, Airtable can help make managing your fundraising event a breeze. 

If you’ve ever taken on a fundraiser yourself, you know just how big a task that can be. Using Airtable as a CRM can help you to manage your contacts, track who is donating funds, and track the communication between potential investors. This template, Fundraising CRM, from the Airtable team can be a great starting point that can be customized depending on the scale of your fundraiser. If you are looking to track non-monetary items, see this base, Fundraising Tracker, to see how you can manage your fundraising team and track their progress.

Education Examples from Experts on the BuiltOnAir Podcast

At BuiltOnAir, we have a weekly podcast focused on Airtable and the people who use it from all around the world. We’ve been able to speak with some amazing guests and see some incredible bases and demos on the many many different use cases for Airtable. We’ve pulled some episodes that complement the Education Industry. Check out the episodes below and see how Airtable is being used by other Education Professionals.

• Alex Hillman, Educator and Serial Entrepreneur – Alex is an educator and entrepreneur and uses Airtable to manage the many different hats that he wears. In this podcast episode, Alex shows us the Airtable CRM he built that he uses to track the qualitative and quantitative measures of his student’s successes.
• Patrick Ford, University Media Developer – Patrick is a media developer at the Maker Space at Anderson University. Patrick created a Makerspace Manager used to reserve machine equipment, reserve inventory, and as a calendar by the students that need to use the lab.

Other uses for Airtable and Education:

Creating a Lessons Schedule – If you are an educator that needs to coordinate lesson times with multiple students, Airtable can save you time by organizing lessons all in one place. This base for Teaching and Lesson Schedules utilizes Airtable’s forms and lets the students select the times that work for them, which automatically update into your database. 

Tracking Admissions and Licensure for Courses – From an administrative side, there can be many different facets that need to be tracked and processed. This base shows incredible details and a well thought out database for tracking admissions and licensure for students and the school. Utilizing blocks and multiple views, you can easily see what tasks are still needed, who has applied, and much more.  

Continuing Education Credits – For those that need to track their education courses in order to keep current licenses, Airtable can help by organizing hours logged, classes you’ve taken, and how many credit hours you have left to complete.

The Top Video & Written Tutorials for Using Airtable with Education

Here we’ve pulled together some great written and video tutorials on Airtable from others that use it with the purpose of Education. Some tutorials were created by the Airtable team themselves while others come from users showing how they accomplished a certain task. This is a great place to let inspiration strike on new ideas for using the powerful platform or a place to help you get answers to questions you have about creating or utilizing an aspect of Airtable itself. Take a look below to see our list:

Everything You Need to Know about Airtable Forms | Gareth Pronovost

This video tutorial is a great walkthrough on how to create a form in Airtable that can be used for class surveys, collecting information from your teaching staff, and many other uses because of its customizable abilities. 

• How to create fields that will be used on your form
• Creating the Form View
• Editing form fields (required, non-required, drop-down view, redirect after the form is completed)
• Prefilling a form
• Hiding Fields

VIPKID: Using Airtable to Prep and Organize | Amy Morganson

This video is from a VIPKID teacher and how she organizes her teaching workload. This video gives you a great visual of how Airtable works and the many different ways that it can be used for teaching. 

• A walkthrough of her base and the different views

The Best Tool to Organize Your Teaching | Makers & Minions

This guide was made by a teacher for other teachers and highlights why the tool works well for the important work that you do. Inside you can find: 

• An overview of what Airtable is
• A look inside her Teaching Base
• Ideas on use cases 
• Links to her Teaching Base and her Benchmark Airtable Base

Airtable | The Class Nerd

This written tutorial also comes from a teacher and showcases how he uses Airtable to organize data, like test scores and lesson plans. 

• Overview and Airtable “lingo”
• Linked Records
• Filters and Views
• Collaborators

Attendance Tracker | Gareth Pronovost

This video was made by Gareth Provonost and shows exactly how to set up an attendance tracker. If you are teaching a course and need to track your students, prospective and current, this video shows you exactly how to set up your Airtable base to track attendance. 

• A walkthrough of the different tables (Students, Purchases, Classes, Calendar)
• A look at the formulas used
• Calendar

Guide to Airtable | Airtable

If you’re brand new to Airtable itself, this is the place to start. This getting started guide (published by the Airtable company) walks you through an overview of functionality, then the starting points for creating a database, setting up field types, adding records, linking between tables, using Airtable as a collaboration tool, filtering and sorting, and finally how to publish views of your database.

There is also an advanced tips and tricks section with links to keyboard shortcuts, a list of integrations, and the Airtable API. To go beyond the basics in the Guide to Airtable, use the tools and resources listed here in the Ultimate Guide to Airtable.

The Airtable power user’s guide | Airtable

This guide is exactly what it sounds like; a guide published by the Airtable team targeted at power-users. Once you’ve gone through the introductory guide and as you’re putting together your education database schema, chances are you’ll want to dip into this guide occasionally to get additional insights on all the capability available to you during the process.

Finding the Right Service Providers to Help Your Education Work with Airtable

This section of our Ultimate Guide is all about finding a service provider to help you implement your ideas into reality. While many can easily see the unlimited possibilities with Airtable, sometimes outside services are needed to bring your visions to fruition. No matter where you are in your process, finding the right service provider is crucial when designing or implementing systems. In this section, we’ve pulled the most relevant service providers with the Education industry in mind. Since we here at BuiltOnAir are the go-to place to find information on all things Airtable, we are always on the lookout for proven and trusted service providers and keep an updated list in our Resources Library. You can see all our favorite service providers here. 

Listed below are just a few great options of service providers that are dedicated Airtable experts, excel in automation, and are focused on enhancing workflows. No matter the project, the options below are a great starting point as you are looking for help.

Based in central Utah (“Silicon Slopes” as many people refer to it), Openside is the premium provider of products and services in the Airtable space, and has an impressive history of success stories. Starting off as a scrappy team of developers and programmers doing one-off projects for smaller businesses, they quickly developed a knack for building custom integration tools and implementing them for their clients. 

With time they garnered attention for the quality of their tools as they developed them, and began offering both tools and services to the Airtable userbase, from Yoga studios to Fortune 500 companies. With their main focus today being on helping businesses (including those in sales and marketing) to make their workflows shine, Openside sets a standard for quality as the first fully dedicated service provider for Airtable.

Here are some relevant links to the things Openside does

Here are some relevant links to the things Openside does

• A list of products built/provided by Openside
• Services offered by Openside
• A case study on a VA loan company – the story of a Hawaii-based company using Openside’s services

If you already have your workflows in place but would like to integrate Airtable in, the folks over at BaseGenius are just what you need. BaseGenius specializes in integrating Airtable into existing workflows by building custom, or one of their ready-made, apps to go hand-in-hand with your work. 

• Instead of a larger start-up fee, they charge a flat monthly rate
• They are quick. Their ready-made apps can be integrated in 24 hours while custom made ones can be done in a week.

GAP Consulting

Gareth Provonost is the brilliant mind behind GAP Consulting. Gareth’s consulting firm is centralized on Airtable and Zapier and helps to organize data, automate administrative tasks, and keep you focused on what matters, your work in Education. 

Not only does Gareth offer services, but he also runs an awesome blog and youtube channel where he provides tutorials and how-tos on using Airtable to its maximum potential. 

• Check out his Airtable Blog 
• See his Youtube Channel wit new videos posted weekly

Gareth was also a guest on our podcast season one. Hear how he got started using Airtable and why he has based his business around the awesome tool.

If you’re looking for help from a freelancer or considering more options for improving your education setup, consider these choices:

Where to go from here

You’ve reached the end of this Ultimate Guide to Airtable in the Education industry. Our hope is that you were able to find some useful information to assist and further improve your Airtable workflows. The BuiltOnAir team worked hard to create an ultimate guide full of resources geared toward helping you in your Education efforts. We hope that you return to this guide as often as you need (and even bookmark it) and that it proves to be an excellent resource itself for finding relevant information on all things Airtable. Remember, we are always on the look for new and great Airtable resources, tools, and service providers and will do our best to update this guide as Airtable and the industry grow.

To make sure our guide and efforts to keep users like you in the know, please let us know if you find something that is no longer relevant or applicable anymore. We pride ourselves in being the go-to place for all Airtable questions. The best way to stay connected to what’s happening in and around Airtable is to become a BuiltOnAir Insider by joining our newsletter updates and Slack Channel. We share tons of great content pertaining to new additions to our resource library, relevant community threads, and the latest happenings. Don’t forget, we also have a Podcast where we feature fellow Airtables users around the world. You can subscribe to our BuiltOnAir Podcase here. Our goal as a team is to provide and equip you with every possible tool you could need to make the most out of Education work and Airtable.

To your success!

P.S. Want to see guides for other industries (including real estate, supply chain, and web professionals)? Click here to go directly to the list!