Analytics Driving Student Journey Improvement - A Guide in 10 Points
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The document presents a guide by Olivier Dupuis outlining 10 key points on how analytics can enhance the student journey in post-secondary education, emphasizing the need for a personalized and supportive experience. It highlights the importance of understanding diverse student backgrounds, tracking digital interactions, and using data to improve retention and engagement. Ultimately, it advocates for a data-driven approach to comprehend and enhance the unique experiences of students, leading to better institutional support and improved KPIs.
Analytics Driving Student Journey Improvement - A Guide in 10 Points
- 1. A Guide in 10 Points to Analytics Driving Student Journey Improvement By Olivier Dupuis, Founder of StudentAnalytics.io
- 3. The Student Journey Point 1 You create the conditions for a memorable post-secondary experience Post-secondary years are more than a learning experience, they are a life experience. Students are involved in a journey that is not only academic, but also a journey of personal growth, socializing, gaining experiences for future employability, etc. It is the institution's responsibility to create a stimulating environment where students live the most enriching and fulfilling experience of their lives.
- 4. The Student Journey Point 2 Not all student journeys are the same As accessibility increases, students attending college and university have a diversity of backgrounds, goals, challenges and needs. They go through their unique path from pre-enrollment to registration, graduation and eventually employment. You have the responsibility to support them throughout that journey, no matter how different their path is from other students. If your focus is on the retention of at-risk students for example, how you intervene in their journey should be different depending on if a student is studying part-time, is an adult, a foreign student, or if he/she is working part-time, a parent of young kids, living outside the campus, etc. It can get overwhelming how very rich yet massively complex all student journeys can be. Analytics provide windows into those many journeys.
- 6. Leaving Traces Point 3 Students are expecting personalized experiences ”Using activity patterns to recommend resources of particular relevance in the individual’s context (taking account of course, unit and even physical location) will accord with student expectations of a quality experience” - JISC Students are constantly connected via their devices and are a single message away from an interaction that might enhance their experience. It’s a matter of understanding where they are in their journey and how you can further support and engage them. For example, if a prospective student visits web pages that relates to tuition fees, they may be prompted to start a chat with a financial advisor. That recorded conversation could then prompt future interventions, knowing that this student may require more support in regards to their financial needs.
- 7. Leaving Traces Point 4 Being always connected creates a deluge of data you should harvest Students leave a trail of digital interactions on their educational path. Here are a few examples of data sources: Institutional tracking systems • CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) • Student card readers • Ticket distributors • Location sensors Social Medias • Facebook • Twitter • Foursquare • Instagram Direct communications • Email • Chat • SMS • Phone Institutional online services • LMS (Learning Management System) • Registration system • Online portal • Library databases
- 8. Leaving Traces Point 5 Analytics helps you map a student’s journey There are many strategies to capture and structure the relevant pieces of data. Through data collection and transformation, we can merge data points to form a picture of a student’s journey. For example, a student may be interested in registering to a course. He might ask a few questions to a peer mentor on Facebook (social medias), visit an academic advisor (CRM), use the registration system (online institutional system) and ask questions to a support agent (chat). All those data points can be joined to trace a student journey that provides you with deep insights into that specific registration process and how to improve it.
- 10. Continuous Student Journey Improvement Point 6 Combining those student journeys gives you an overview of what a standard journey looks like You can get a complete picture of their journey, from recruitment to graduation by building a student journey map from the ground up. Student journey maps gives you the basic skeleton of the many academic, social, personal, financial, professional objectives and tasks a student needs to complete. Aggregating the thousands of student journeys gives you that overview of what a real typical journey is. But it also provides insights into the many challenges faced by students. For example, as a student transitions to college, he will need to register to his classes, familiarize himself with his new campus and its many services, make friends, find a job, buy books, etc. A data-driven student journey map reveals bottlenecks and where it can get overwhelming for students.
- 11. Continuous Student Journey Improvement Point 7 You now have the data to understand student segments Not all student journeys are the same. So how does the journey of an international student differs from that of every other student, for example? By dividing the thousands of student journeys you’ve compiled between international and domestic students, you can start answering those questions. For example, you might notice that visits to financial advisors are more frequent for international students, but most importantly that those visits are still frequent by the mid-point of their first term. Meaning that those students are not paying their full attention to their upcoming exams. That might put them at risk. By segmenting your student population, you start seeing how a specific group of students live their experience differently from the others and how you might better support them.
- 12. Continuous Student Journey Improvement Point 8 Apply human intelligence to your data Analytics is the process of providing the insights to spark conversations between stakeholders and guide you towards improved services to support and further engage targeted students. It encourages cross-sectorial communication, sharing of ideas and better understanding of how each sector plays a role in the overall experience of a student. The data does not provide silver bullet solutions, for example against international student’s retention challenges. But it can point you to problem areas which are then further explored by your team. In the end, human interpretation will make sense of the data and what it means to you.
- 13. Continuous Student Journey Improvement Point 9 Continuously enhance how they experience their journeys Knowledge gives you power to change the experience of your students. Whether you are servicing first-year students, international students, social science students, all students, etc. – refining your understanding of the many journeys taken by your students is the first step towards deploying the right services to further support and engage them. Throughout their journey, students will face different challenges and have different needs. How your institution provides the services that will contribute to their progression and how a student will persevere throughout that journey, all those interactions are what will in the end contribute to a student’s experience.
- 15. How Are You Enhancing Their Experience? Point 10 Analytics should drive your experience enhancement efforts The student experience challenge are triggered by the attainment of KPI goals and few leads as to how to improve those metrics. There is a missing layer between those high level performance indicators that might give you an overall rating of how satisfied students are with your services, or a general retention rate for your students. But there’s usually not much underlying data that provides insights to explain those results. Analytics lets you start answering those questions from what’s really important: how makes each student journey unique and how you can better support them. Only when you start on that data-driven quest to better understand those journeys and how some share similar challenges, can you really start improving your KPIs but better yet, enhance the experience of all students.
- 16. How Are You Enhancing Their Experience? In Conclusion Work with your own team of data-driven student journey improvement experts A student analytics infrastructure is a must-have to any student experience improvement program that wants to rely on facts instead of perceptions. We think of ourselves as your missing layer that joins your high- level KPIs and the efforts you make to improve your student’s journey. How is your team feeding the conversation as to how to further improve the experience of your students? Request your free demo and strategic consultation: https://StudentAnalytics.youcanbook.me odupuis@StudentAnalytics.io