Analytics

The action analytics of the future will better assess students’ competencies. Using individualized planning, advising, and best practices from cradle to career, these action analytics solutions will align interventions to facilitate retention and transitions and will fully maximize learners’ success.

EDUCAUSE has identified analytics as one of the grand challenges for 2007. This session will share an analysis of data collected from over 30,000 students using a course management system and will explain how analytics can be used to make predictive decisions about student success and inform early intervention efforts.

The importance of student success (commonly measured as degree completion) continues to rise, as does the demand for institutional accountability. Academic analytics can help institutions address student success and accountability while better fulfilling their academic missions. Academic systems generate a wide array of data that can predict retention and graduation. Academic analytics marries that data with statistical techniques and predictive modeling to help faculty and advisors determine which students may face academic difficulty, allowing interventions to help them succeed. This paper highlights what IT and institutional leaders need to understand about academic analytics, including changes it may require in data standards, systems, processes, policies, and institutional culture.

In responding to internal and external pressures for accountability in higher education, especially in the areas of improved learning outcomes and student success, IT leaders may soon become critical partners with academic and student affairs. IT can contribute to this call for accountability through academic analytics, which is emerging as a new tool for a new era. This session will explore the emerging field of academic analytics and its potential impact on the institution and IT units. John Campbell will share the potential of analytics, explore the role of IT in analytics projects, highlight some early projects, and close with some considerations for building an analytics project on campus and potential policy concerns. The session will be based on an article [PDF 601 KB] published in the July/August 2007 EDUCAUSE Review by John Campbell, Peter DeBlois, and Diana Oblinger.

Creating a culture of evidence tops the list of important issues as the academic technology profession moves to an “Instruction 2.0” world.

As colleges and universities respond to the public demand for greater accountability in the form of documented learning outcomes and increased student retention, the emerging practice of academic analytics can create actionable intelligence for higher education institutions.