1 / 14

IU-FLAGS: supporting student retention and success at Indiana University

IU-FLAGS: supporting student retention and success at Indiana University. 2012 FYE Conference March 26, 2012.

alida
Download Presentation

IU-FLAGS: supporting student retention and success at Indiana University

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. IU-FLAGS: supporting student retention and success at Indiana University 2012 FYE Conference March 26, 2012

  2. University administrators love student retention and success efforts because, when done well, they are intensely revenue-positive. Student services leaders love retention and success efforts because, when done well, they have an immensely positive impact on the lives of students. • IU-FLAGS is an enterprise system being designed to support campus and/or school-based programs intended to support students at risk of leaving IU without a degree or who are at risk of taking too long to earn a degree.

  3. For years the need for systematic support for student retention and success has built up at our sister campus in Indianapolis and at the regional campuses. • Faculty and staff engaged over several years in efforts at retention and success, and developed significant expertise, but they did not have applications to support their efforts. • In Fall 2010 a committee was established to study the issue, chaired by Kurt Zorn (Bloomington) and Rick Ward (IUPUI). • The committee studied vended products being used at other similar 4-year institutions, and developed a list of requirements for the system, working from November 2010 to April 2011. • The committee recommended that IU build its own system, using its in-house expertise • The proposal was to engage in four projects that would result in a first-rate application: a new roster, a survey capability, a learning analytics and reporting process, and a dashboard for presentation of data and tracking follow-up with students. • In April 2011 the committee was asked to have a roster in place by Fall 2011. A short history...

  4. To give retention and success programs the tools they need, we are bringing together 3 kinds of data *pre-enrollment academic risk *post-enrollment academic risk *data-mining of past student behaviors and risk System Basics

  5. Pre-enrollment academic risk data includes but is not limited to SAT/ACT scores and survey questions, high school grades, quality of high school courses, etc. Post-enrollment academic risk data includes but is not limited to faculty-submitted course-specific attendance and performance data, student survey data, Oncourse data, etc. Data-mining of our retention and success failures seeks to find attributes that identify current students for target intervention programs. Then we will bring together all this information into an integrated view where we can track risk, interventions, and students’ behaviors in a case-model history for each student.

  6. Each IU campus is unique and each will require a tailored set of analytics for each area of risk. • While the body of research on student retention and success is vast, it is our goal to significantly further such research, as should be expected of an R1 institution. • Special attention will be given to developing new kinds of data and knowledge about student behavior as it is occurring. • One new area of study includes student use of Oncourse • IU-FLAGS is also deviating from normal practice by forgoing large scale student surveys in favor of ‘footprints’ and ‘triggers.’

  7. The Student Performance Roster • Designed to replaced several existing rosters…fewer is better • Not truly a Peoplesoft roster but a dynamically generated report: saves hundreds of staff hours in roster support

  8. Student problems ‘flagged’ on the roster appear on the student’s My Grades page in SIS • Campuses are currently using 20 reports in the IUIE to pull data entered on the roster and follow up with students. Commonly someone on campus is running reports and distributing information to campus faculty and staff as appropriate, though there are reports there for everyone in the IU community to use. • Faculty and Staff using the My Advisees function in SIS can obtain data and manage ‘flagged’ students without using the IUIE

  9. By mid-April we will have had 4 rounds of enhancements to the roster based on faculty input, and will consider the roster ‘implemented.’ Enhancement work will continue, however. • Ongoing data analysis by our Principle Academic Researcher to develop models for pre-enrollment risk of retention and success. There will be different models for each campus, though these will be determined by the analysis. • Coming spring and summer 2012 • Studies and data crunching will begin on Oncourse Events data to determine if such events have predictive value for retention and success. • We will begin analysis of the inventory of current surveys being conducted at IU campuses • The eventual process for managing all data and follow-up, creating case-histories of students’ flags and other advising issues, is an Advising Notes system called FLAGS. All flags and follow-up, with significant operational reporting, will be managed here. This summer we will be conducting design reviews, showing pages in the system’s test environment to the IU community and soliciting feedback.

  10. Coming Fall 2012 • Core functionality of the FLAGS (notes) system available for use by schools who currently use Advising Contacts in SIS, or others who want to adopt early. Note it will take at least another year before all components specific for this system can be in place. • Weeks 2, 3, and 4 of the fall: Pre-admission risk models (yielding for each student two predicted gpa scores and two predicted retention scores) will be generated and available either through FLAGS (notes) or through the IUIE reports. • Some student survey data will be available either through FLAGSor through the IUIE. • Data mining will begin to identify ‘triggers’ and ‘footprints’. Triggers are attributes that predict retention risk, such as “a female nursing student at campus X changes major’ and statistically we know that this doubles her risk of dropping out of school. Footprints are student behaviors that tell us something of interest without us asking the student, such as, ‘student x, who has attributes a, b, and c drops a class’ we know that this mean he is z% more likely to graduate in 6 years rather than 4.

  11. As triggers and footprints are identified and defined, the survey team will propose mini-questionnaires to collect further data. The idea is that when a student engages in certain actions, we may ask them to answer a question or two, as part of the process, that can help us with retention and success efforts. In this way we do not have to conduct massive campus-wide surveys with all the problems they entail. • A governance structure of two committees has been proposed for ongoing management of the system. • Data-modeling begins by the business intelligence team to model IU-Flags data for high level analysis and administrative reporting.

  12. Coming 2013 • Survey data, triggers and footprints fully integrated in to FLAGS (notes). • FLAGs notes completed (December). • Business intelligence tools will be available to administrators of IU-FLAGs data. Coming 2014 • Begin process of analyzing the effectiveness of retention and success programs to feed back to campuses assessments of what is working, what is not, and what might be most cost-effective. • Evaluate the status of the system and programs and propose budget for ongoing fixed management needs such as revising data models, enhancements, and maintenance.

  13. IU-FLAGS site: http://usss.iu.edu/sites/IUEarlyAlertSystem/SitePages/Home.aspx • Anyone can access, but if you login (requires IU username and password - upper right corner of page) you will see more information including project and support documents, job aids, links to campus resources (IUPUI has a wonderful IU-FLAGS campus web site). • Feel free to contact me, Jim Murray jmurray@indiana.edu For Further Info…

More Related