Student success is the cornerstone of any higher education institution's mission, and it's clear why: high success rates directly impact your institution as a whole. Implementing student success software can help your institution improve success rates by providing students with greater accessibility to campus resources and support services.
It can be tough to choose between the sea of options in the education technology landscape. Watermark and EAB are two well-known platforms that offer unique capabilities, and the right one for your institution depends largely on your goals and needs. Let's explore what makes each platform different.
Comparing student success solutions: Watermark Insights or EAB?
Watermark and EAB are giants in the educational technology landscape, and their student success platform offerings seem very similar at first glance. However, some key differences could affect which solution is the better choice for your institution.
Both solutions aim to:
- Improve student success: In today's higher education ecosystem, using the right software is essential for improving student outcomes. A good solution will provide students with open access to the resources they need to answer questions, reach out for help, and seek support in their educational pathway.
- Create more connected campuses: Students must be able to access campus stakeholders to feel supported in their education. Both Watermark and EAB solutions offer advanced communication capabilities that let students connect easily with faculty, administrators, and other students.
- Enhance institutional operations: Both solutions offer advanced data analytics and reporting features that enable institutions to use their data to address existing weaknesses and create new solutions for achieving institutional goals.
The biggest difference between these solutions is how they approach improving student success rates. For example, EAB's software focuses primarily on developing strong support systems to re-engage and retain at-risk students, while Watermark's holistic suite of tools and solutions emphasizes the importance of using institutional and student data to identify and reach out to students who need help.
EAB overview
Formerly known as the Education Advisory Board, EAB is a prominent name in education software. The company serves educational institutions at various levels, including K-12 and higher education.
EAB offers two software solutions for student success, each with a slightly different focus:
- Navigate: This customer relationship management (CRM) solution focuses on helping students navigate their individual educational pathways through academic planning, resource referrals, and targeted outreach. It moves students through the educational pipeline from recruitment to degree completion.
- Starfish: With an emphasis on early alerts and intervention, EAB designed Starfish to help faculty and administrators identify and support at-risk students. Academic performance tracking features and easy access to the student support network let both students and faculty collaborate through the platform to bring students back on track.
The main limitation of these EAB solutions is that they are separate platforms. To get the most powerful solution, you need to implement both. And that kind of system can be costly, especially at scale.
A holistic software suite like Watermark, by contrast, offers a wide selection of tools available for student and faculty success with user-friendly operation and high efficiency.
Watermark Insights overview
Since 2018, Watermark has offered a full suite of purpose-built software specifically intended to empower continuous improvement at higher education institutions across the country.
Watermark Student Success & Engagement combines the best of both Navigate and Starfish into one comprehensive solution. Here's how:
- Predictive analytics: Our AI-powered solution uses the various data sources on your campus to proactively identify obstacles to student success, which can help you re-engage and retain at-risk students.
- Seamless integration: As part of the Watermark suite, Student Success & Engagement integrates beautifully with other Watermark platforms to create a single resource for all student data.
- Institutional reporting: In-depth reports on degree completion rates, student engagement, retention, and more enable accurate insights into how your institution can improve student outcomes.
- Data-driven insights: Watermark's software provides a single source of truth for the entire institution, which makes it possible to conduct accurate performance assessments and allocate resources in ways that better support students.
- Student engagement: Students need to feel engaged with their education to truly improve their chances of success. Watermark's platform offers features that facilitate communication and collaboration among students, faculty, and advisors to foster that sense of connection.
With Watermark, educators can automate notifications and other behind-the-scenes processes to focus completely on helping students achieve success, whether that means completing a degree program or obtaining a certificate in a high-demand skill.
Factors to consider before investing in any student success software
Higher education software is a significant investment for any institution regardless of budget or campus size, so it's important to choose the right one. Consider your institution's overarching needs and goals before making a final decision.
Some factors you might want to look at:
- Vendor support: A technology vendor that offers ongoing support and excellent customer service is essential for getting the most out of your investment. Watermark offers various levels of support as well as live training sessions to help you meet goals.
- Security and compliance: Watermark adheres to all essential education technology standards and regulations, including FERPA, LTI, and WCAG 2.0.
- User experience: Watermark's solutions are intuitive and user-friendly, so anyone can log on and get to work right away. With a streamlined user interface and frictionless integrations with the most popular education technologies, Watermark offers institutions an easy, engaging platform.
- Level of personalization: Student Success & Engagement empowers students to take greater ownership of their education through personalized coursework and coaching strategies. See how Fayetteville Technical Community College (FTCC) leveraged these capabilities to better support military students in completing their education.
- Mobile accessibility: Watermark's mobile app lets students connect with their institutions anywhere, at any time. They can track attendance, schedule appointments, monitor their educational progress, and get in touch with peers, all at the tap of a finger.
- Scalability: With merger and acquisition (M&A) becoming more common in higher ed, ensuring your software scales is more important than ever.
- Frequent updates: Did you know education is one of the most targeted industries for cybercriminals? Technology changes constantly, and new cyber threats are always appearing. Watermark consistently updates our software solutions to keep pace with the evolving cybersecurity landscape.
Learn more about Student Success & Engagement from Watermark
At Watermark, we care about more than enrollment numbers. We center our solutions around the people these numbers affect, so higher education institutions can see real change. Our Student Success & Engagement solution empowers all institutional stakeholders to transform data into actionable insights that improve student outcomes and create a more connected campus.
Contact us today to request a live demo of Student Success & Engagement.
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