Student success plays a critical role in helping higher education institutions build lifelong relationships with learners. Intelligent technology tools can reduce the barriers to student success.
When I was teaching high school mathematics in Los Angeles, the things I most longed for were more time and more resources for my students. Imagine the success that students could achieve if they were provided 24/7 support, could spend more time with their advisors, and could have access to expert knowledge guided by intelligent technology tools. Technology is now able to make this vision of student success a reality, scaling the connections between students and educators.
Student success is critical. We want students to do well in college, which typically means getting good grades and graduating on time. But that success has an important follow-on impact. Colleges and universities want to build strong relationships with alumni long after graduation, and student success plays a role in how alumni view their college experience. As the workforce changes, or as alumni change careers, they'll need to continue their education, and colleges and universities would like to be top of mind when it comes to providing relevant services for returning students and continuing learners in their communities.
Facilitating successful college or university careers creates enthusiastic learners and strong, supportive campus communities. Higher education institutions need to boost academic success now more than ever: 77 percent of students worry that with most of their learning going online, they won't get a quality education, according to a McKinsey & Company study.1 In the COVID-19 era, new AI and machine-learning-based student success tools, such as the one we've created at Google, are becoming the engines for student success and lifelong campus and student communities.
The Roadblocks to Student Success
How do we define student success—and what gets in the way of that success? At its heart, student success is about achieving a high degree of mastery in a field of study, which hopefully correlates with good grades and high graduation rates. Success also extends beyond graduation in terms of an ongoing relationship with one's college.
Many things get in the way of a positive student experience, such as a college or university's inability to grasp when and how a student might be struggling. Unexpected life events can interrupt learning:
- Unplanned expenses could cause students to drop classes or suspend learning for a semester or longer.
- Family and childcare issues can create distractions and push students to drop out of school.
- Stressful situations like negotiating the financial aid system and registering for classes can lower students' chances of success.
People still perceive the college and university experience as something where experts are located within an institution, and students have to go to that institution to access that knowledge, assuming the knowledge-holders have the time to share it. This is especially true for mid-career learners, students who are caring for their families, or students who have to juggle jobs and school. They'd like to learn at odd hours but can't match their schedules with those of the instructors.
Finding the Student Success Insights Hidden in Data
Technology can reduce the barriers to student success—freeing students to learn and scaling access to expert knowledge. Technology can also help institutions identify problems and create services to help struggling students and better serve alumni who would like to keep learning. Data is crucial for solving problems, and even though many of the tools used by administrators gather tons of data, making sense of it is not easy. Visibility is poor. With cloud-based AI tools, institutions can work with the data to better understand the obstacles to and drivers of student success.
The Unizin Consortium, a nonprofit organization of thirteen higher education institutions, including Indiana University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Michigan, are gleaning insights from the Unizin Data Platform (UDP), a data warehouse built on Google Cloud. One of the ways institutions are using the UDP is by trying to understand which teaching methods have the most impact on students, a task that was all but impossible for individual instructors to figure out on their own.
The UDP allows instructors to pool data about things like how quickly they give students their test scores or the advice they give students about the best learning practices—and compare that data to outcomes like grades or actual pages read. Unizin helps institutions unify data from the LMS, SIS, and other learning tools by providing a common data model. The institutions believe the resulting analytics can truly be game-changing for learners.
"We like to use data to make predictions, but our ultimate goal is to design interventions that change those predictions," says Benjamin Motz, director of Indiana University's eLearning Research and Practice Laboratory. "That's how we can support the faculty who support students."
More Time to Advise and Teach
If educators and advisors can reduce the time they spend on routine student-support tasks, they can spend more time guiding students toward success—improving the student experience and scaling teaching and counseling. Penn State World Campus, the second-largest campus in the Pennsylvania State University system, built a virtual assistant based on Google Cloud that uses AI to automate responses to routine student queries like how to change majors or defer enrollment. Testing has already shown that the virtual assistant is about 86 percent accurate, and it improves as the model processes more questions and learns from them. The hope is that fast, accurate answers will help students confidently plan their academic careers.
Strategic Educations Inc., which serves working adult students through Strayer University and Capella University, is taking a similar approach. Strayer created a virtual agent called Irving, which was built with Dialogflow, Google's natural language processing tool, to search campus databases for answers to student questions. Many of Strayer's students are taking care of families and working full time, so 24/7 access to automated help is a critical support tool. Students can check on grades, confirm enrollment status, or ask questions about registration; if enough problems are detected, the university can quickly take steps to fix them.
Scaling Teaching Is Connected to Student Success
If cloud technology and AI can help improve students' study skills and help students navigate through the complexities of enrollment, imagine what these tools could do to place the knowledge of dozens of educators at students' fingertips. They'd not only become successful students before graduation, but they'd also gain a lifelong love of learning. We want people to always be learning so that every day is a school day!
To find out more about how Google Cloud's Student Success Services powers data analytics, virtual assistants, and other technology to support student success initiatives, check out the blog or watch our on-demand webinar, "Student Success: Providing a High Touch Student Experience."
Note
- Hayoung Kim, Charag Krishnan, Jonathan Law, and Ted Rounsaville, COVID-19 and US Higher Education Enrollment: Preparing Leaders for Fall, research report, (New York, NY: McKinsey & Company, May 2020). ↩
Lukman Ramsey is the Global Solutions Manager for Education at Google Cloud.
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