Improve student experience and student success by capturing data throughout the learner lifecycle
Improve student experience and student success by capturing data throughout the learner lifecycle.
The challenge of declining enrollment, along with the coming demographic cliff of 2025-2037, isn’t news to higher education leaders. Much work has been done across the field to improve student retention and success through programs, engagement strategies, and the use of technology. Best practices in student engagement, expanded experiential learning opportunities, creative financial incentives, and reimagined curricula are all important parts of the playbook for minimizing student attrition and maximizing success.
However, as any CIO or student success leader will attest, these systems and strategies can be labor intensive for the staff who plan and coordinate interventions and support. It's important to identifiy which students are most likely to benefit from specific interventions and when a more integrated, data-enabled approach is required because of the scale at which universities operate today. That’s particularly true with the expansion of hybrid and remote learning. A more robust solution is needed to personalize support at scale to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of students.
As a leader in education, you know the power of experience in driving key outcomes for your students throughout the “learner lifecycle.” The learner lifecycle refers to the journey a person takes in their ongoing pursuit of knowledge and career advancement, which is typically not linear. In every phase of interaction, from site visitor to enrolled student to loyal alum, there’s an opportunity for data-driven insights and improvements.
We’ve shared examples below of ways you can leverage data and technology to improve student success:
Consideration – Does your digital front door make it easy for your prospective applications to find information?
Application – Are you able to anticipate and remove stumbling blocks in the application process?
Decision – Once accepted, do you have the right insights to drive enrollment yield?
Enrollment – Do your new students have a defined journey through the enrollment process?
Engagement – Are you able to identify students with low engagement to mobilize the right interventions?
Graduation – Are you able to identify students at risk?
Affiliation – Is student data effectively leveraged to create a long-term alumni relationship?
Start by integrating your fractured data to provide a more holistic view of your students.
For all these opportunities and more, data creates the foundation for improving experience. But for most institutions, data across the lifecycle is fractured across systems for marketing, application, enrollment, billing, learning management, and student information systems, not to mention silos by academic schools and departments. Imagine the power of having a single view of each student throughout the lifecycle.
Consider the challenge of identifying students at risk of isolation. For example, faculty may not have the view that student engagement staff have of students’ comings and goings across residence halls and dining facilities, but they do have a view of attendance, in-class participation, and graded events, which student engagement staff may not be able to see without requesting specific access or authority. But were these data sets combined, they may better indicate students at risk of isolation. To be fair, many universities examine challenges like this with similar combinations of data—perhaps with even more data sets. However, in many cases, this analysis is performed manually on an ad hoc basis and is time-consuming to produce, or insights arrive too late to help students.
While the effort remains challenging, modern data and analytics technology systems can more easily capture student voices at scale and across the student lifecycle. These systems can simplify the task of receiving, storing, analyzing, and visualizing data:
Cloud-based data warehousing services can integrate data into central repositories of information across universities.
Predictive analytics via low- or no-code machine learning algorithms can predict student challenges by learning from previous outcomes.
Visualization and reporting tools (e.g., Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Amazon Quick Sight) can provide comprehensive—and comprehensible—insights into student performance and wellness.
While these technological solutions are no panacea, they represent a tremendous step forward for university staff and faculty who must deploy limited resources to perceive students’ challenges and devise interventions that improve student success outcomes.
Improve student experiences through the use of master data management solutions for education.
To build off of the previous recommendation, consider how master data management (MDM) can play a crucial role in helping colleges and universities deliver better student experiences by providing a consolidated and reliable view of each student. MDM is a technology-enabled approach to ensure data is uniform, accurate, and complete. Think of MDM as the central nervous system of your data.
Understanding student preferences and behavior from disparate data has historically been extremely difficult. It's particularly important in higher education where data is scattered across many systems and needs to be harmonized to provide a single view of the truth. Correctly and continuously interpreting indicators of student experience is critical, especially when conditions shift as quickly as they did during the pandemic. Integrated data and systems can be used to detect signals of trouble, especially those linked to retention throughout the student’s experience at your institution.
One of the first steps is to evaluate and select the Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solution that best fits your college or university. iPaaS provide several advantages over point solutions. iPaaS can support MDM by providing a framework to define, manage, and maintain a single, authoritative view of data, which is the essence of a golden record. These platforms also simplify the integration of applications, data, and processes within a department and between different colleges, universities, or state departments of education. They provide a unified platform to manage these integrations, which reduces complexity, enables automation and scale, and can deliver significant cost savings.
AUTOMATING STUDENT GOLDEN RECORDS FOR ACCURACY WITH SPEED
One of the largest community college systems on the West Coast decided to embrace data integration and MDM to improve student success and completion rates. This community college system provides administration and governance for multiple colleges, education centers, and specialized workforce and economic development programs for local businesses, governments, and NGOs.
As a part of their strategic plan to increase student success, the district decided to move beyond the limitations of their legacy technology landscape toward a modernized stack and business process automation coupled with an iPaaS solution. Once the iPaaS solution was in place, the college could quickly consolidate and produce error-free student data records. The community college’s decision to modernize data management across the enterprise resulted in numerous benefits that also contributed to improving the student experience throughout their college learning journey.
