Category: Higher Education
AI PROJECT-PREP FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
After almost a year of weighing the pros and cons of AI at your institution, creating an action plan, and cross-collaborating with your peers from other institutions, your team has finally decided that AI is the future for recruiting, retaining, and ensuring your students’ success. Congratulations! Before answering one of the dozen daily emails in your inbox from AI software and services vendors, you should first take some cautious pre-project steps if you are serious about the success of your future AI project. Here are six AI project prep steps you should take before setting up any meeting with an AI software or service provider:
1 – choose and define your use cases
You probably already have the high-level Future Action Roadmap¹ if you’ve come this far, but you can’t, in project terms, “boil the ocean” with a “big bang” AI project covering everything on the map. No Higher Education institution has that kind of time or money. It’s time to pick one to three high-profile use cases where the need is most urgent. Perhaps it’s all about predicting student behavior and outcomes so you can sooner identify students at risk. Or maybe your school would like to personalize student learning and support services to help increase retention. It is very likely your marketing team has been in touch with you about how AI will help them segment and target prospective students for recruitment and deliver personalized and engaging marketing campaigns that can increase awareness, interest, and conversion rates for enrollment.
In March 2024, Scott Sorenson, Executive Director, Data Privacy & Analytics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, shared how they built a pilot using Salesforce’s AI-powered Tableau Pulse at the Data Analytics Alliance for Higher Education. They focused on use cases for the Marketing and Advancement Departments. Right away, they involved the participating departments, and the team at Tableau helped them build the business case for approval. The Results: Success. The Advancement team liked it and will include it on their IT roadmap, and the Marketing team loved it and wanted it yesterday. Some lessons learned from the UAB pilot:
- Get the interested teams involved early and define the roles each will play.
- Develop air-tight use cases founded on strong business reasons.
- Even if business reasons are solid, leave plenty of time for executive iterations and approval.
- Developing AI and Data Governance will take twice as long as you think it will.
2 – DON’T DELAY YOUR AI GOVERNANCE AND SECURITY
Lessons learned on the UAB AI pilot segue perfectly into perhaps the most crucial pre-project activity: AI Governance and Security. This should be a strong focus at the beginning of your AI journey, as it is foundational for your institution’s success. Some things to consider:
- Ethical Considerations: All policy decisions should align with ethical principles and the DNA of who you are as an institution. Ensure transparency, fairness, and equity. Institutional leaders (Chancellor/President, Chief Academic Officer, Chief Information Officer) are pivotal in driving ethical AI practices.
- Senior Management: Define roles, responsibilities, and accountability related to AI governance and ensure that senior management oversees AI initiatives.
- Risk Assessment and Iteration: Regularly assess risks associated with AI implementation and adjust policies accordingly.
- Data Security and Privacy: Data handling and privacy protection will help keep your student and staff data safe. Mistakes made with the mishandling of private data can have serious consequences, so It’s imperative to put guidelines and best practices in place for collecting, storing, and processing data used in AI systems.
- Transparency and Accountability: Not surprisingly, AI has the same biases as its human counterparts. Make AI algorithms and decision-making processes transparent with regular reviews, carefully define responsibilities, and hold accountable AI system performance and outcomes.
3 – IT’S ABOUT THE DATA
The legacy systems used by your staff for the past two decades need to be assessed to determine if they are truly ready for AI. Do you have a Unified Data Platform to collect, store, process, analyze, and share your data with data visualization tools? How reliable, relevant, complete, and diverse is your data? Work may need to be done with Data systems before choosing the AI solution. The Data sources you will need will depend heavily on the use case. Here are just some Data systems commonly used for AI:
- Student Information Systems (SIS) – Holding admissions, enrollment, grades, and financial aid information is often critical for Student Success analysis.
- Learning Management Systems (LMS) – Platforms like Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle will facilitate online learning, course management, and distribution of educational content.
- Human Resource Systems – These systems handle employee data, payroll, benefits administration, and recruitment processes.
- Vendor-based Systems – Specialized software for recruitment, student success, assessment, space management, and more.
- External Data Sources – Registers, databases with scientific information, and other external systems that can support enrollment, recruitment, marketing, and student success decisions.
4 – CHOOSE YOUR AI SOLUTION
These steps are in this order for a reason. Not until the first three steps have been started and the first draft has been completed can you even begin to make an informed decision about AI technology that will bring your use cases to life. The questions to ask:
- What type of AI solution best suits your problem or opportunity? The areas with the biggest impact on securing your institution’s future success are typically Student Success, Enrollment, and Retention. The market is catching up quickly with AI offerings to support these initiatives.
- Do you want to build your own solution from scratch or use an existing solution from a vendor or a partner? The old rule of buy to compete, build to differentiate still applies to AI Projects. Buying off-the-shelf (OTS) AI solutions should be where you start. It is still the lowest-cost entry to AI. Building your own should be for ambitious projects where no other OTS solution exists for an identifiable, mission-critical, market-differentiating AI use case.
5 – DEFINE THE KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPI)
At the start of the UAB AI pilot project, after the use cases, governance, data, selected solution, and approvals were in order, Sorenson met with his Marketing and Advancement teams to define what metrics they wanted to see. From there, he determined what data was needed for the metrics. He then asked them what success looked like to them. UAB implemented a pilot, but it’s no different from deploying the actual AI Solution. In fact, it’s more critical.
Defining KPIs will determine how you build the solution. Some common metrics used in higher education include the following:
- Number of student minutes on a website – Does it lead to a greater conversion percentage to enrollment?
- Year over Year (YoY) percentage of resources used by at-risk students – Does it correlate to YoY percentage of Student retention?
Setting these KPIs will guide improvements toward success and ensure the Leadership Team that your investment in AI is seeing the hoped-for impact on enrollment, retention, and student success. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you will use to track its progress and results?
6 – AND FINALLY, PLAN YOUR IMPLEMENTATION
Before you even select a vendor to implement, how will you deploy your AI solution in your institution? You’ve determined what data from which systems are needed, but now it’s time to consider how you will integrate and unify your data into a usable format for AI Analytic consumption.
Keep in mind, just because the letters A and I are in front of your project, it is still an IT project, and the best practices for this haven’t changed much in the past couple of decades. Bring all the lessons learned at your institution, your institution’s developed best practices, and industry PMO Best Practices² to this project, as you would any project.
RESOURCES:
- Datatelligent Platform for Higher Education: https://datatelligent.ai/subscriptions/datatelligent-platform-for-higher-education/
- Tableau Pulse: https://www.tableau.com/products/tableau-pulse
- Data Analytics Alliance for Higher Education: https://landing.datatelligent.ai/daahe
CITATIONS:
1. Jenay Robert and Nicole Muscanell, 2023 Horizon Action Plan: Generative AI (Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2023) 2023 EDUCAUSE Horizon Action Plan: Generative AI
2. Abudi, G. (2011). Developing a project management best practice. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2011—North America, Dallas, TX. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute. https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/project-management-best-practice-organization-6167
Demystifying AI in Higher Education – 3.26.24 @ 3:00 pm PT
Datatelligent is hosting an in-person learning exchange, Demystifying AI in Higher Education. Please join us on March 26 from 3-5 pm at the Hampton Inn in Puyallup, WA, for an informative and fun learning exchange focusing on AI in Higher Education.
- Walk away with practical knowledge and examples of how to get started with AI tools and solutions
- Learn to utilize the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform for AI/ML, including predictive, generative, and large language models (LLM).
In addition to the insightful discussions, there will be ample opportunities for networking and engaging with fellow attendees who share a passion for leveraging Data and AI to revolutionize education.
Please RSVP at your earliest convenience to secure your spot at this exciting event.
We look forward to welcoming you and exploring the exciting possibilities of AI in Higher Education together!
Event Details
Event Title: Demystifying AI in Higher Education.
Date / Time: March 26, 2024, from 3:00 to 5:00 pm PT
Location: Hampton Inn, Puyallup, WA
Agenda:
- 2:30 – 3:00 : Arrival
- 3:00 – 3:30 : Introductions
- 3:30 – 4:30 : Demystify AI
- Trends / Definitions / Fundamentals / Tools / Limitations
- Practical Examples of AI Solutions
- 4:30 – 5:00 : Roundtable discussion on AI in Higher Education
- 5:00 – 6:00 : Happy Hour and Networking
We look forward to seeing you there!
RAPPELLING THE ENROLLMENT CLIFF
What IS THE ENROLLMENT CLIFF
Higher education enrollment in the United States has been declining since 2010, a trend aggravated by the pandemic, resulting in a staggering 15% drop and the loss of 3 million students nationwide over a little more than a decade.1 Educators expected college students to come back once the pandemic lifted. Unfortunately, this has not happened due to a variety of reasons including students questioning the high cost and overall value of college to pending demographic shifts referred to as the Enrollment Cliff.
A Cliff? Yes, a decline in birthrates during the 2008 Great Recession equates to an estimated 15% drop (roughly 576,000 students) of 18-year-olds eligible to enroll in college starting in the Fall of 2025. As an article in Best Colleges put it, “The enrollment cliff poses a Darwinian threat to higher education, allowing only the wealthiest and market savviest to survive.” 2
ADDRESSING THE SHORTFALL
How can schools address this shortfall in available prospective students? In their analysis, Best Colleges identified characteristics of schools that are successfully navigating the Enrollment Cliff:
- Possess a deep understanding of their student body.
- Excel in fostering student success.
- Demonstrate adeptness in identifying and attracting students who are best suited for their programs.
- Remain attuned to emerging trends and popular programs among their students. 2
Those who know their students best will have the best data about their students. It’s only common sense.
aSSESS MARKET SAVVINESS
In a recent webinar with Datatelligent, Cowley College shared how they are grabbing the rope and rappelling gear in preparation for the cliff: they built a data-driven culture and started making data-informed decisions about their enrollment, retention, and student success.
“We were already seeing a lot of these challenges in enrollment and retention a few years ago, students questioning the value of Higher Education, poor management of our internal resources, and staffing challenges,” said Stefani Jones, Director of Student Enrollment and Success at Cowley College. “We asked ourselves, ‘how do we do what we need to do with what we have?'”
Seeing these trends, Cowley knew they needed to understand their students, and what types of students enrolled and thrived at Cowley. They also needed insight into the effectiveness of their marketing and recruitment strategies and activities. Like many institutions, the data about their students was scattered across different systems and compiled into spreadsheets and inadequate reports. They lacked the data insights they needed to make meaningful decisions to overcome enrollment challenges.
“It was difficult to tell what was working,” said Jones. “Whether it was marketing strategies or recruitment efforts, we couldn’t see if any of it related to an increase in student applications. We were doing everything manual and requesting reports we then had to compile.”
BECOME DATA DRIVEN
The team at Cowley, partnering with Datatelligent, built a platform that unifies their Data and provides Analytic Solutions. Using the Enrollment and Admissions Trends Solution, Jones states Cowley can see and act on the following:
- Track marketing and recruitment efforts and tie to enrollment trends. “We can see when we get an uptick in applications and tie it back to activities in the past two-week period to identify if our efforts are working.”
- Identify which undergraduate programs are trending. “We can now identify programs of study that are a hotter trend this year or in the upcoming semester. This allows us to work with Academics and help them to grow and move resources to the programs where we see student interest. “
- Insight into performance of high school partners. “We can finally see which high school partners are doing well and converting into enrolled students and identify which high school partners we need to get into a little more and provide additional services.”
KEEP STUDENTS YOU HAVE
Once marketers and recruiters have successfully attracted and enrolled students, it is critical that schools do everything they can to retain and help their students succeed. This is a key component to becoming a Data-Driven Culture. Leveraging the Student at Risk Solution, Jones explains how Cowley College has improved the student experience and increased retention by making real-time, data-informed decisions:
- Identify Students at Risk – based on a set of risk factors tailored to the trends and circumstances of your students, programs, and region or state. “We didn’t have in place the risk factors that advisors could act on and reach out to students proactively and see how they can help. Now we do. This helps in our retention efforts.”
- Real-time information about student and program performance – This allows you to quickly identify opportunities to improve the student experience. “At the end of the semester I would collect all the information advisors and Department chairs wanted to provide me about students and programs, and I would capture it all on spreadsheets. Everything was extremely manual.”
- Provide targeted, proactive intervention – “Prior to bringing our data and analytics to one platform, advisors would have to go to multiple tools to get the information on their students. Now it’s all in one place and very useful to the advisors and us.”
Conclusion
In the face of the Enrollment Cliff and the changing landscape of higher education, institutions must adopt a data-driven approach to navigate these challenges effectively. Cowley College’s proactive stance demonstrates the importance of understanding students, tracking trends, and making real-time, data-informed decisions. By unifying data and leveraging analytics, institutions can attract, retain, and foster student success amidst ongoing uncertainty. Embracing this mindset will be crucial for institutions to emerge as leaders in higher education’s evolving landscape.
REFERENCES
1. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Current Term Enrollment Estimates: Fall 2023 Expanded Edition. National Student Clearinghouse. https://nscresearchcenter.org/current-term-enrollment-estimates/. January 24, 2024. Accessed February 29, 2024.
2. Drozdowski MJ, Earnest D. Looming Enrollment Cliff Poses Serious Threat to Colleges. BestColleges.com. Published January 27, 2023. Accessed February 29, 2024. https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/looming-enrollment-cliff-poses-serious-threat-to-colleges/
Seven Steps to Building a Data-Driven Culture in Higher Education
What we are hearing
At Datatelligent, we spend hours a day listening to all our customers in Higher Education. In the listening, we hear a lot of recurring concerns and themes. Here are just a few things we hear:
- “Traditionally, we’ve had strong student retention, but lately, it’s trending downwards, and we want to know why.”
- “We want to know who our students are and find out the kind of students who succeed in our programs, but we don’t know where to start.”
- “We need to identify at-risk students better and faster so we can get them the resources they need before it’s too late.”
- “We like to say we’re an institution that makes data-informed decisions, but in reality, we don’t look at the data because we don’t have an easy way to look at data.”
- “We need to simplify data visualization. We need dashboards that tell our people, ‘Here’s what you need to know.'”
- “We know we have the answers in our data, and we talk about unifying data so we can build the analytics we need to understand our students, but we have systems everywhere, and we don’t have the big-dollar budget to integrate them.”
When we hear this, we know we’re talking to customers on the journey to building a data-driven culture at their institutions. They are experiencing growing pains. Being good listeners, the team here at Datatelligent wants to minimize the pain and speed up the growth.
Building a data-driven culture
We hosted a recent webinar with Debbie Phelps at Cowley College, Executive Director of Institutional Effectiveness and proud “office of one.” Debbie explained how she, with limited resources, built a data-driven culture where they truly make data-informed decisions.
Debbie started with a plan and made Datatelligent a partner in their journey. Our team and our solutions played their part, but Debbie was the driving force behind the journey to being data-driven. Here’s how they did it.
1. leadership commitment and vision
- Leadership Buy-in: Without this, the plan to build a data-driven culture goes nowhere. University leaders, including administrators, deans, and department heads, must champion the importance of data-informed decision-making. Their commitment sets the tone for the entire institution.
- Vision Statement: Develop a clear vision statement that emphasizes the value of data-driven practices. Communicate this vision consistently to your team.
2. Infrastructure and data systems
- Data Governance: Establish robust data governance practices. Define roles, responsibilities, and processes for data management. Ensure data security, privacy, and compliance. This takes a lot of work, but our customers, like Cowley College, who do this, see bottom-line lasting benefits and improve the success of their students – the real reason behind what we do.
- Integrated Systems: Invest in systems that allow seamless data integration. Siloed data inhibits effective decision-making. This is where the Datatelligent Platform for Higher Education really helps you build your data-driven culture.
3. Data Literacy Training
- Training Programs: So many institutions make the mistake of taking a “build it and they will come” approach. Not Cowley College, and not Datatelligent customers. We always advise and help you design regular workshops and training sessions on data literacy. Your team should understand basic statistical concepts, data visualization, and interpretation.
- Department-Specific Training: Don’t forget to tailor training to specific roles (e.g., admissions, student services, finance). Each department has unique data needs.
4. Transparency and Communication
- Transparency: This is an essential part of your governance and security plan. Also, make it a part of the training. Be patient about data sources, methodologies, and limitations. Your team should know where the data comes from and how it’s processed.
- Regular Updates: This ensures everyone is on the same page in a data-driven culture. Provide timely updates on institutional performance metrics. Dashboards and reports should be accessible to all team members.
- Feedback Loop: Just as Datatelligent listens to customers, as a data steward of your institution, it’s important to listen to your “customers.” Encourage your team to provide feedback on data quality and usability. Act on their insights.
5. Data-driven decision-making processes
- Define Key Metrics: Key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to each department. For admissions, it might be enrollment rates; for student services, retention rates; for advisement, identifying the students at risk and designing academic plans that ensure student success.
- Use Cases: Illustrate real-world scenarios where good data and data visualizations influenced decisions. Share success stories to inspire everyone.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Encourage collaboration across departments. Data insights often emerge at the intersection of disciplines. If you get the chance to talk to your peers at Cowley College, this is something they do well.
6. Ethical Considerations
- Privacy and Consent: Your team should understand the ethical implications of handling student data. Ensure compliance with privacy laws (e.g., FERPA). This has remained constant, and hyper-vigilance is needed as AI tools are rolled out to enhance analytics.
- Bias Awareness: Train your team to recognize and mitigate biases in data analysis. Ethical use of predictive models is critical, especially now that we have entered the age of AI, which, not surprisingly, mimics the same biases as its human counterparts.
7. Continuous Improvement
- Assessment: Regularly assess the effectiveness of data-informed practices. Are we moving the needle on student retention? Are we identifying students at risk sooner? Are decisions improving? Is your team using data effectively?
- Celebrate Wins: We encourage all our customers to do, acknowledge, and celebrate instances where data-informed decisions lead to positive outcomes. Recognize every team member’s contributions.
Conclusion
We have learned from our customers at Datatelligent that building a data-informed culture is a long but rewarding journey. It requires collaboration, adaptability, and a shared commitment to student success – the real motivation behind what we do. By empowering your team with data literacy and fostering a culture of curiosity, colleges, and universities can thrive in an increasingly data-driven world that will soon have jet-fueled added to the engines once AI tools catch up with the rest of us data-driven thinkers.
Optimizing the Student Lifecycle: Datatelligent Platform for Higher Education – 2.14.24 @ 2:00 pm CT
Managing the student lifecycle is a multifaceted endeavor, demanding both time and attention. From enrollment to retention and eventual success, educational institutions must navigate numerous factors, each critical for student advancement.
Enter the Datatelligent Platform for Higher Education – a comprehensive solution tailored to address the intricacies of student performance, faculty efficiency, and staff effectiveness.
In the upcoming installment of our series, we delve deeper into the challenges confronting higher education institutions today and illuminate strategies to surmount these obstacles effectively. Discover firsthand how Cowley College successfully tackled enrollment issues, offering invaluable insights and actionable tactics.
Attendees of this webinar will learn about the following:
- Current trends for Student Retention and Success
- How Cowley College is using data to improve Student Retention
- Making data-driven decisions with the Datatelligent Platform for Higher Education
The presenters for the webinar will be:
- Steve Wightkin – Chief Customer Officer at Datatelligent
- Stefani Jones – Director of Student Enrollment and Success at Cowley College
Webinar Title: Optimizing the Student Lifecycle: Datatelligent Platform for Higher Education
Date: February 14, 2024
Time: 2:00 pm Central
Location: Online Webinar (Zoom)
Date: February 14, 2024
Time: 2:00 pm Central
Location: Online Webinar (Zoom)
We look forward to seeing you there!
Elevate Education: AI Solutions for Higher Education – 11.15.23 @ 12:00 PM
2023 has been the year of Artificial Intelligence. People are talking about it everywhere you go, and organizations are trying to figure out how to use it.
Datatelligent and Snowflake have partnered to help institutions like yours enable the use of AI within your organization.
Join us for an educational and informative webinar, Elevate Education: AI Solutions for Higher Education, on the hot topic of AI and how you can bring this exciting technology into your institution to improve speed to market and get better insights.
Attendees of this webinar will learn about the following:
- AI trends in Higher Education, including the use of predictive analytics and generative AI
- How to enable the use of AI with Snowflake’s Unified Data Platform
- Examples of AI deployment in Higher Education
- Quick ways to get started now.
The presenters for the webinar will be:
- Rob Wellen – Chief Strategy Officer at Datatelligent
- Brendan Schultz – Sales Engineer at Snowflake
If you would like to read more on the ever-growing importance of AI, feel free to check out our blog post here. This blog is filled with great insights into how colleges and universities are utilizing AI across the entire campus.
Webinar Title: Elevate Education: AI Solutions for Higher Education!
Date: November 15, 2023
Time: 12:00 pm Central
Date: November 15, 2023
Time: 12:00 pm Central
We look forward to seeing you there!
The Importance of AI-Powered Analytics in Higher Education
The future of AI is now
At Datatelligent, we look to the future for ways to help our customers solve decades-old Higher Education problems. We hear a lot of questions lately about AI and what it means for Institutional Research. Questions like, “How can Generative AI and Large Language Models help our analytics? Will adding AI extract the predictive insights we need to help students and help us with retention, recruitment, and funding?”
Well, it’s funny you should ask. On November 15, 2023, we are hosting a webinar on these very topics with our most AI-innovative partner, Snowflake. Elevate Education: AI Solutions for Higher Education.
Snowflake is moving fast, at Chicago-blizzard pace, embracing all that’s AI and announcing earlier this month, during Snowday, a host of new AI tools. We will in turn innovate with our Higher Education customers and implement these tools into the Datatelligent Unified Data Platform.
The Definition of AI in Higher Education
AI-powered analytics is the use of artificial intelligence to analyze large datasets to identify patterns, trends, and insights. Here are some of the areas will innovate with AI-powered analytics with our higher education customers:
- Student success: AI-powered analytics can be used to identify students who are at risk of dropping out or failing a course. This information can then be used to provide targeted interventions, such as tutoring or academic advising.
- Student Recruitment and Enrollment: considered one of the holy grails of analytics, identify the best mix of students who will benefit and are succeed from the specialties offered by the institution. Closely related, AI can help identify so you can focus recruitment on the students that will help your institution win and retain their grant funding.
- Enrollment Trends: Identifying the trends early that will impact future enrollment. Linking to all sorts of internal and external data sources, AI-powered insights helps plan for student recruitment in fast-changing demographics.
- Faculty Planning: Recruitment doesn’t stop with students. AI can help with faculty planning, identifying the educational specialties that are in demand now and in the future. Recruitment efforts and education certifications can be planned years in advance.
- Personalized learning: Personalized learning experiences can be created for students using insights from AI-powered data. This can be done by adapting course materials, providing individualized feedback, and recommending additional resources.
- Administrative efficiency: Why not have that AI-bot be the helpful assistant it wants to be, automating scheduling, grading, and admissions processing? This can free up time for faculty and staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.
The Challenges of AI
Of course, AI is not the magic pill to make all our analytic and Institutional Research headaches go away. At Datatelligent, we help mitigate the challenges AI-powered analytics brings to higher education:
- Data quality: AI-powered analytics immediately bring up Data Quality. Institutions need to ensure the data is accurate, complete, and consistent, or your “insights” will be none of these.
- Bias: AI algorithms can be biased, which can lead to unfair or inaccurate results. Data Analysts need to be aware of the potential for bias and make sure a human takes steps to mitigate it.
- Ethics: The use of AI in higher education raises a number of ethical concerns, such as the potential for surveillance and discrimination. Institutions need to develop clear ethical guidelines for the use of AI in higher education. At Datatelligent, we have a well-developed AI Governance and Ethics framework.
Overall, AI-powered analytics has the potential to revolutionize higher education. As with any revolution there are always challenges, which is why it’s best to align with an ally before overthrowing any king. We’ll be talking about the AI Revolution on November 15. We hope to see you at the Datatelligent and Snowflake AI Solutions for Higher Education webinar.
How a Customer Service Approach Can Drive Student Success
I had the opportunity to attend Educause’s 2022 annual conference, which brought together IT leaders, technology professionals, and campus stakeholders in the higher education community. I was overwhelmed with the amount of excitement, ingenuity, and creativity on hand—whether in the breakout sessions, panel discussions, or hallway conversations and meetings, I came out of the conference energized and ready to tackle 2023.
But what has gotten me so excited? It’s the untapped opportunity we have to harness data to improve student retention, academic success, student financial health, student LMS engagement, and learning outcomes.
And there was one statement that kickstarted this train of thought:
During a panel discussion, one of the speakers stated that early in the semester, a large number of their students had not even been to class. Many hadn’t even been to the cafeteria.
What does this say about student success? Or their journey?
It brought me back to some ideas that have been on my mind. We need to start applying the lessons learned in other industries to our work in higher education.
I spent a big part of my career working with financial institutions. The number one topic is always customer retention: understanding a customer’s journey within the financial institution, working to retain them, and knowing the triggers that might cause them to leave.
The way to help hold on to that customer is by making your relationship more sticky, which can be accomplished by:
- Establishing a solid relationship with that customer and helping with their financial needs
- Cross-selling to that customer. The more services you provide, the less likely they are to leave.
- Understanding not only the individual customer but their whole household
When I think about the word retention in higher education, I see parallels from other industries. And I see opportunities to apply those learnings in new and innovative ways using data.
I see retention as the byproduct of student success. If we better support the student’s journey from the point of enrollment, their persistence/retention is far more likely.
Having a data-first approach is essential to making this a reality. Colleges and universities that have built a solid data analytics foundation are able to better understand the student journey by stitching together data from disparate systems. This unification of data helps identify broad macro trends and also addresses student needs at the individual level. They are able to pinpoint early warning signs and begin intervention efforts to address issues before they are catastrophic.
For example, we at Datatelligent have been working with numerous colleges and universities to develop Student Success & Retention Solutions that integrate data from throughout the institution — academics, housing, student financial health, etc. — and help identify at-risk students. The solution’s dashboards are highly visual and easy to use, allowing advisors and other staff members quick and efficient access to information essential to improving student success.
These analytics dashboards empower staff to intervene at the student level and help them identify broader trends or issues. School administration is now armed with the information they need to make data-driven decisions, can spend less time cobbling together reports, and can allocate their time to improving the student experience at their schools.
Learn more about Datatelligent’s Student Success & Retention offerings and see how our clients are using this custom solution to identify and retain at-risk students.
Visit www.datatelligent.ai for more information on our higher education offerings and learn how our clients are becoming data-driven.
