Making sense of learning analytics to deliver better student support
services
Over the past couple of years, the profile of a typical university student has changed dramatically.
Today’s millennial student demands and expects a personalised learning experience – and universities
need to evolve to keep up.
Part of this evolution involves refining and improving retention strategies, in order to engage students
throughout the whole student lifecycle. While student retention has long been an important issue for
universities, now that students have more choice in their own learning and education, it has never been
more important for universities to look for new ways to attract and retain students.
Failure to do so can not only have consequences for student success, but also for institutional objectives.
According to research by the Australian Universities Review, ‘while students who do not complete may
still benefit from skills developed, including increased confidence and life experiences, in the current
competitive and globalised higher education market, the reputational fall-out of low student retention
and high student attrition figures can be damaging for institutions.’
So what steps can universities take to create and roll-out effective student retention strategies that not
only ensure student engagement and success, but also deliver on business outcomes?
For many, the answer is learning analytics. To create an engaging and personalised experience,
universities must understand their students, and how they best learn and engage. Learning analytics
provides a tool to achieve this and can help universities to develop strategic retention and engagement
programs based on student behaviour and feedback.
The University Of Southern Queensland (USQ) is one university who is leveraging learning analytics to
improve overall student retention and success. Based on the understanding that learning analytics is not
only about the larger picture, but also about taking smaller bits of information to create an accurate
picture, USQ recently developed an analytics framework to aid decision making in the student
engagement process.
Ahead of Student Retention and Success 2016, Fernando Padro, Director (Learning and Teaching
Support) University of Southern Queensland, explores the strategies involved in establishing the analytic
eco-systems that can help universities to assess the impacts or contributions of student engagement
opportunities on student success.
Download Brochure
Providing anytime, anywhere support to students
“USQ, like many universities, is at the nascent stage of developing a learning analytics framework.
Within the Learning and Teaching (LTS) Unit, we have been creating our own framework because our
function is to provide student support, as well as academic staff support.
One of our functions is a learning centre, which involves traditional learning centre activities, tutorials,
workshops one-on-ones and small group meetings. The other function is a peer assisted learner
program called MeetUp, which is linked to about 60 of our courses. MeetUp allows students to work
with academics, who provide outside of the classroom support on a one-on-one or group level to those
students.
Those are our two key programs and we also have online support activities as well, considering USQ is
primarily an online university. Through scheduling software programs, no matter where our students are
– whether they are online or on campus – they can sign up to this program and then can contact us for
support how ever they want (email, Skype, call) and have a one-on-one interaction.
For after hours, we also have a product called Smart Thinking that provides students tutorial support in
maths and writing. We have captured a 24/7 support service to provide exceptional support for our
students, which will in turn hopefully keep them learning in their courses.”
How providing student support can equate to improved retention
“These programs are only about two to three years old. It was three years ago we decided to integrate
all these efforts into one data-set to figure our whether or not we’re making a difference. And this
difference is not necessarily in terms of impact.
Initially we did some forensic investigation using some early data from our peer assisted program over
two time periods for a couple of courses we picked at random. We discovered we actually made a
statistically significant difference in terms of half a point grade average, as well as an 18% retention
increase.
As a result, we’re now lining up analytics because we know what we’re doing is working. We’ve been
collecting data for the last three years and have established a domestic database. Our next step is to
somehow connect this dataset with the data warehouse of the university to come up with the story. The
point of the issue – and it should be for any university undertaking a similar journey – is what are you
going to look at that makes a meaningful difference?
We’re currently working with our SBMI to establish a more seamless connection between data. We’ve
been working on creating a framework platform as to how to look at things and why to look at things
and that seems to be working for us. We’ve also identified what elements about student success we’re
looking at and we’ve included this in the framework.
Download Brochure
We’re looking at persistence; we’re looking at progression, retention and grade point averages and
student satisfaction. It’s important to gather information other than on a formative basis of how
comfortable your students are. We’re currently in the middle of conducting analytics to establish what
would be attractive for our students versus the must have. This is the type of analysis that is not always
done in higher education.”
Overcoming challenges along the way: focus on the small wins
“The biggest challenge is trying to do something overnight – like you can just flip a switch and you’ll
make changes - and that simply doesn’t happen. I came to USQ three and a half years ago and at the
time, my colleague who is now my Deputy Director, was working on creating a model of
interconnections relating to student support programs, not only within the LTS unit, but for the
university on a broader base.
But the first big challenge we faced was that these units either have no existent, partially existent or
fully existent re-emerging databases or at least a data collection capacity. So the question was what
were we going to do about that? The answer was that we needed an evaluation strategy, as well as an
analysis and interpretation strategy even within that.
The first step we took to overcome this challenge was to follow Karl Weick’s ‘small wins,’ which basically
says, don’t try to recreate everything – just take on what you have and see where it leads to. If you can
get good results from that, then the additive principle actually becomes a summative one and then you
will be able to see the strengths of what the unit is through these small individual analyses.
So rather than trying to completely re-establish everything, we’re taking what we had and then building
a story, which is why we did historical analysis just to see whether we were in the ballpark.
The issue is: what are you going to do with what you have? Do you either throw it all out or start from
scratch? Or do you try to rebuild or build with what you have – even though it might be sketchy or it
could be apples and oranges?”
How to use learning analytics to boost student retention
“The most basic thing is you need to come up with meaningful information that means something to
you. That is the critical part. From a pragmatic side, because of regulatory compliance, a quick and dirty
way to do it is by looking at the risk framework. Because again, it’s tied to potential risks to students and
a lot of the stud we’re talking about is a potential risk to the students.
The next step is to have patience. It’s also important to investigate what it is and how you are able to
integrate your information with the university’s information to come up with a consistent story.”
Download Brochure
Interested in learning more? Join Fernando Padro at the Student Retention and Success 2016 where he
will further explore how to use learning analytics to establish a holistic eco-system for student
development and support.
For more information visit www.studentretention.com.au or call +61 2 9229 1000 or email
[email protected]
Download Brochure