Higher education institutions increasingly turn to assessment and curriculum management to find the data needed to support student achievement. Software purpose-built for higher education and other technological advances allow colleges to demonstrate institutional effectiveness.
How to Apply Data-Driven Processes to Higher Education
Higher education institutions can leverage data-driven processes to:
- Improve recruitment and marketing strategies: Better-connected data solutions can help you increase your recruitment strategies' success and better target your marketing efforts.
- Gauge the success of certain initiatives: Using data trends, you can measure the effectiveness of your decisions.
- Leverage projections and historical trends: Instead of strategizing based on assumptions, advisors can brainstorm ideas based on reports displaying trends and patterns.
- Understand student success and retention rates: Data will illuminate student retention and success rates, such as low retention rates for specific cohorts.
- Intervene with at-risk students: Using data gleaned from trends, instructors can decipher ways to provide additional support and increase the odds of student success and retention.
- Evaluate and enhance curriculum: Data will highlight commonalities and patterns so you can create plans for improvement and revise your goals. (For example, do courses with high student dropout rates have anything in common?)
- Connect digital channels: Data collected from digital avenues such as mobile apps, websites, email marketing campaigns, and social media accounts can tell you how people are responding to and engaging with your brand.
- Gauge instructor productivity: You can also use data to evaluate whether replacing part-time faculty with full-time instructors would be more cost-efficient.
- Track resources: Optimizing your resources can open up opportunities for reassessment and make your operations more efficient.
Impact of Technology on Higher Education
Better-connected solutions mean improved user experience and efficiency for campuses. Leading-edge platforms empower institutions to gain insight into their most pressing questions. How does a department's performance measure up to the university's mission? Are students demonstrating learning outcomes per their career goals and aspirations?
Benefits of Data-Driven Culture in Higher Education
The impact of technology on decision-making in higher education has been shown to be advantageous. Data convergence solutions allow college administrators to:
- Establish consistency
- Develop faster decision-making processes
- Speak one common language
- Break down silos
- Allow faculty members wider access to data
- Prioritize student success
- Establish predictive practices
- Streamline operational processes
The Future of Data in Education
As processes shift in higher education, universities can create a positive learning environment, improve user experience, and enhance their virtual capabilities through improvements in data and technology.
According to an Annual Digital Study Trends Survey from McGraw-Hill, more than half of a group of 1,000 U.S. college students feel that digital learning technology positively affected their work.
Drive Meaningful Improvements With Deeply Connected Data
Watermark understands the growing importance of leveraging data to make informed decisions that positively impact learning outcomes for students. In higher education, each data system has historically been a silo that offers its greatest insights when connected to other data systems.
Learn more about how Watermark solutions can eliminate these silos and enable you to drive improvements for students. Request a customized demo today.
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