How Data Can Help

Kevin Hogan, Content Director at eCampus News This episode of Innovations and Education is brought to you by Renkus-Heinz Quality audio is crucial to create a productive and engaging learning environment for students. And professors should be able to focus on teaching, not troubleshooting, complex technology. At Renkus-Heinz, their hassle-free loudspeakers consistently deliver crystal clear audio to every corner of the classroom, ensuring every student hears every word. Elevate classroom engagement and learning outcomes with the Renkus-Heinz sound solution. [email protected]. OK. Hello and welcome to another episode of Innovations and Education. eCampus News's podcast on the latest and Greatest in Higher Ed Tech this month. I'm your host, Kevin Hogan, and I'm glad you found us. Community colleges play a pivotal role in providing accessible and quality education to a diverse range of students. However, as many of us are aware, the challenges faced by these students can differ significantly from those of traditional four-year institutions. From juggling work and family responsibilities to navigating financial constraints, Community College students often find themselves in unique situations that demand equally unique solutions. In this episode, we're going to unravel the intricacies of the support landscape for Community College students with Alex, leader Alex serves as the Chief Impact officer to Watermark, a software platform designed for higher education institutions to help them collect and use data to gain insights into how. Institutions and programs can be approved to support student success. Alex shares his insights, drawn from working closely with educators, administrators, and students themselves, shedding light on strategies that foster engagement retention. And overall success. Have a listen. We're OK. Thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Alex Leader, Chief Impact Officer at Watermark You're welcome, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Kevin Hogan And I know that this conversation is one that I've had over the last few months, and in a few years actually, as long with everything else, kind of sick of talking about it. But the pandemic still kind of has a, you know, not a hold over us, right. But it is still, we're just kind of emerging from this period that there's been just a lot of monumental. Chefs, especially when you talk about higher education. Thankfully, the conversations that I was having. In the spring of 2020 through 2022, we're desperate actual conversations about what the future of higher education was going to look like, whether schools are going to be closing all over the place. But one of those? Things was a discussion of how this might. Be a moment. For community colleges to shine and to come forward. I'm not quite sure if that has played out as the prognosis were. Let's start off to talk a little bit about your experiences and specifically what the work that workbook does in conjunction with and for community colleges. Alex Leader And maybe we'll start as even just speaking to where you started with the pandemic and potentially an opportunity that exists for higher education coming out of the pandemic. But I do believe that there is opportunity we what we saw with the pandemic, obviously whether it was four year or two year institutions was that they had. To change quickly. They had to. Figure out what was working. Figure out some things that maybe wouldn't work in this new environment or new normal if you will, and ultimately double down on those. Activities to really support students and to go through really inspect themselves. Say, can we continuously improve? Can we shorten our continuous improvements or rapidly change while continuing to support both students and then obviously ensuring institutional processes are refined in such a way to to support those students as well. So I think that. COVID while yes, it was certainly terrible, it also provided some glimpses into how. Quickly, can we change in higher education? Which really leads into your follow-up question around Watermark. What we do here at Watermark Insights and so really our goal is to help both on the institutional effectiveness side as well as student success side of higher education and then those traditional going two separate disciplines, if you will within higher education. We really believe they're one and the. So you have to be able to rapidly innovate and rapidly ensure that you're producing graduates that are matching the opportunities that exist within the job market and ensure that your curriculum drives that type of expertise for students. You obviously have to be accredited to ensure that the degrees and certificates being offered are are worth something, and then you also have to support the learner. On their journey. And that's really where the student success side comes in. And so we really have a set of products, 6 products specifically within our product suite that allows us to really focus on those two areas to ensure that the institution becomes high performing while supporting students and ensuring that they are positive. Kevin Hogan So you mentioned the learner. Can you talk about the distinctions between the learner, the student who may be in a Community College environment versus what do you think of as a traditional four year liberal arts student? Alex Leader So maybe we start on. The uh. The four. Year Liberal arts side but often times and since we're kind of out of if you will, the pandemic, oftentimes those are individuals that have. Parents who went to college, they can lean on the support systems that they have within their family with alumni that they're aware of. They're living on campus and really for many of those students, their focus is studying. It is the education that that they're to achieve, especially if they're on campus. If we compare and contrast, or maybe. We contrast that. With two year. To your students is that while there? Are a few. There are some two year technical and community colleges that have on campus housing, but for the majority of them it's a commuter scenario where students are are living at home. They're trying to balance having children at home, having to maintain a job, oftentimes paying for their own. And so it's a different type of student with different needs and really the community card system here in the United States was built to handle those. Kevin Hogan So when it comes to. Managing this for helping those folks in terms of automating the curriculum and managing the curriculum. Are there distinctions there for for the administrator? Alex Leader Yeah, there certainly are. And I mean it, it really depends on what the student is attending the institution for. So as I mentioned, within the two year space, you may have some that are after a 2 year degree in associate degree where their positive outcome if you will is not only earning that three but also transferring to a four year. So that's a positive outcome for that student is is getting that to your degree and doing it and performing a transfer so they can. Save money along the way as well. Secondly, 2 year schools technical schools are often offering certificates, right? So one year programs we think about welding for example or other trades like that those to your institutions are really important at providing those type of opportunities for students and those one year programs well, you'll have a whole set of other type of students that are. Your adult learners. You're continuing education more recently, in fact, you have a tremendous percentage, in some cases nearly 50% of 2. Year enrollment might. Be encompassed by dual enrolled students, so or high schoolers taking college courses and so the the structure of A2 year institution. You have many different types of students with many different types of objectives in terms of what they want to accomplish. It may differ from a four year institute. Kevin Hogan So it almost seems like the. Need for flexibility is greater when you're looking at the Community College sort of structure because you have so many different types of learners coming in and out. Alex Leader Yeah, I would say that that's true. The kind of city on a hill vision for education generally is to have a specific and unique path that that learner can follow that satisfies their unique needs. So if we of course, education has to be some degree mass produce right in order to provide scale, but in a perfect world, your education path and everything that wraps around your education is different than what wraps around mine. And we should be able to accomplish our unique paths within the. Structure of our. Just to add that quite frankly, is really what equity is about, right? And so we're we're chasing that as a community and as higher education. Kevin Hogan Another pandemic effect on education as a whole that I found in conversations is the idea that learners, if they're going to. Succeed first need to feel safe. The idea of mental health awareness, social, emotional learning, those sort of concepts maybe before the pandemic or maybe kind of a nice crunchy. Esoteric Theory March of 2020 comes around and we all suffered a group trauma and needed to have those support systems put into place by not only our employers, but our schools. Can you talk a little bit about how many that has changed the way you provide your services as well and and and the needs of learners that? Alex Leader Maybe we'll start is that we work with many two year as well as four year institutions with our. Student success and engagement platform. It's software that helps success, coaches and advisors and other support personnel be able to prioritize the students whom they're reaching out to, but also be able to ensure that they're engaging the right students at the right time. Really make a difference. Why I mentioned all of that is we've done some really great. Research and the state of North Carolina specifically that happened to kind of run parallel and born after the COVID and. And so really, the first research study that I'll mention is 1 where we, along with 10 institutions in that State, 10 two year institutions wanted to understand whether this concept of success coaching you may have heard of them as navigated, for example. But success coaches with them higher Ed. So if you assign a success coach to every incoming. Students and even if you think about incoming, you've done the point which they submit an application. To start to engage that individual before they ever set foot on campus and start to be able to understand who they are and what their unique needs are and what clubs and organizations and affiliations you can help match with that student so that they do feel that sense of belonging. Because when things get hard, IE COVID, you have to have those relationships built in order to. Help a student. Through whatever challenge it is, whether it's COVID, whether it's simply that they don't have transportation, or they'll need childcare resource offered by the. We need that single point of trust. Just like a doctor for for you and I, right. We don't want our doctors changing all of the time of us having to re explain what we've already told the doctor about ourselves. But the point of a success coach is exactly the same. So it's someone I can confide in and build a relationship with. They can connect, connect to me with on campus and off Campus services, ultimately to help me build that. Unique journey that I spoke. And so whether that's, like I said, COVID, well, that's job loss, whether it's their goals change, all of those are pieces of the great work that success coaches and academic advisors help students through kind of this unknown that's ahead of. Them in some cases. Kevin Hogan Can you walk me through a day-to-day use case? You know, kind of an example of how that success. Coach would work. Alex Leader Certainly. And I'll go to a very specific example. But when we think about student support, we think about success, coaches, academic advisors, according to the research, nearly 50% of 2 year institutions, they assign over 300 students to their academic advisors. And we've seen cases, albeit rare, where there's even been 1500. Students assigned to a single academic advisor. Now if we compare that with the success coaches success coaches caseload is much smaller due to the type of work that they're doing. They're they're building those deep relationships with students. They're connecting them to resources both on and off campus. And so often those case loads are much, much smaller than in academic advisors. Case load. But regardless, it's always difficult to be able to. Pull together data from all of the other systems that exist across campus, and to be able to start to formulate and understand where I should spend my time as a success. And so within our student success and engagement platform here at Watermark, that's exactly what it does. It does that heavy lifting connects the steer formation system, the learning management system, the other systems that exist on campus. Pulls that data. Together helps me prioritize how to engage my students and then gives me a set of tools within the platform itself to engage the students. That are on my team. And so you can imagine a student that maybe misses a class last night. Well, I'll know about it this morning so that I can take and perform that engagement immediately before having that student miss two or three or four classes. And there's many examples of of those type of trends where now I can engage before that problem becomes a crisis. The student. And so that's a very specific example. But again, let the technology do the heavy lifting because. Regardless, if I'm a success coach or an academic advisor or another type of support professional, what I love to do is to have those human to human interactions. And ultimately create positive outcomes for students. Kevin Hogan How is that presented like as as? A dashboard 1500 students. Wow. Alex Leader So within our product, you can go to a particular screen. It has your entire queue. So down the left hand side, uh, we're actually using some predictive modeling as well to determine a students likelihood to have success in each of their enrollments in each course as well as their likelihood to return the next term. So you call that person. And so that can help prioritize my outreach based upon their likelihood to be successful in these scenarios, coupled with all of this external data that's also coming into the platform. So it's very easy. It's stop light if you will. Red, yellow, green and I can easily focus in on the students. That need my help. Kevin Hogan It almost sounds I don't want to use this acronym either, but it's very reminiscent of what you would think about when we talk about artificial intelligence. AI is AI being that acronym that we can't. Right. Alex Leader Exactly, exactly. And I think that not sure how far down the AI thread we want to go. But at the end of the day, it's making sure that we're using the. Right tools, the right types of AI to improve these interactions. These engagements that can happen. And so if AI can help that, then certainly it has use and I think hired has warmed up to that. Especially in the last eight months since ChatGPT came out. Yeah. That we're seeing definitely a shift and also some hope within higher Ed that AI can help again build these relationships without us having to do all of the work that exists in our day-to-day front. Work if you will. Kevin Hogan I mean it's, you know, another catch phrase for the education space. Is personalized learning right? And sounds what you're talking about and. Having it be more than a a concept, but an actual application. Alex Leader Yeah, we're actively, of course, exploring AI within our tooling as well. But again with that. View that it has. To improve the interactions, improve the engagement, it has to be done the right way. For it to. Be affected, right? Kevin Hogan And so are folks living on. Watermark system where is the is it more of a of a connection to their other pre-existing platform? Alex Leader Yeah, great question. So if I'm an academic advisor or a success coach, I'm I'm living within our student success and engagement platform and then. Our platform, the watermark platform that I'm describing it then pulls on the data from the other platforms that I would traditionally without a watermark platform would have to check five or six places and try to build that mental model of which students I should. Be working with. We let the tooling do that from Watermark and then it just presents. To me, hey, here's where you. OK. Kevin Hogan Yeah, let's ask about the user user behavior and maybe how that has changed. I know you've covered both K12 and higher Ed and you know there's BP before the pandemic and now AP after the pandemic, there was a lot of faculty resistance. If you use the word data, it could scare folks. There was a lot of. Talk that these sort of technologies would ultimately replace either professionals in the in the administrative side or in in the instructional side. Have you seen a change over the past few years in in that resistance or you kind of give me the state of play? You see that? Do you still have to make the? Argument for your solutions. Alex Leader Great question again. And I mean the long and short of it, I think my short answer would be is that higher education has certainly made shifts since COVID has happened. And I just mentioned and just talked about chat, GT and open AI coming to to fruition in November, I think even since then and there's research to. Created it from some other known research groups within higher Ed that. The view has definitely changed. I've been at conferencing conferences in the last couple of months where the talk isn't about is AI applicable now it is. How can? We use AI. To improve the work and the efforts that that we're doing as an institution ultimately to support our students. So I think we're in this period where certainly there's some. Earlyish adopters that are using ChatGPT to do some writing for them, but I think where AI is ultimately going to up, it's again, how do we use it to maximize our time so that we can build these relationships? That only humans can do. So I speak a lot about AI, which is artificial intelligence I speak. A lot about HR, human intelligence. And I think AI is here to support I in my view, and I'm watermarks view so that that human intelligence and again the relationships can be created that are so necessary. To support students. Kevin Hogan We'll talk about how. You know, this is a kind of a constant evolution, right of the technology. And then the the the user experience. And I'll put you on the spot here a little bit and and looking forward two or three years as things continue to evolve, all things being equal, we're we're out of the pandemic and another global crises will interrupt us. Where where do you see your work, your technologies and specifically within that Community College? Environment where you where what are your? Hopes to see it anyway. Alex Leader Another great question and I. Think I I I opened. A little bit talking about institutional effectiveness and student success traditionally being separate disciplines. Really it it's our. Like I said, our belief at Watermark that those are symbiotic, meaning that you need both, right? You need to be able to be a high performing institution, especially you think about to your institutions being able to match curriculum, develop programs, ensure that learners are receiving the knowledge that they need in two years, get the job that they they really want. And make sure that the demand of that job. And then of course, supporting the learner along the way. And so as we look forward to three years, I see kind of the. City on a. Hill View is being a single set of solutions that really supports the learner from the point at which they first have contact with the institution. Maybe they attend a job fair or whatever the. Case may be. All the way through and supported all the way through. The student life. Including their match with an employer. And so specifically in the two year space, I see that that spectrum, that life cycle and the support of that life cycle being critical to the future. Of to your institutions. Kevin Hogan Well, it's fascinating stuff, Alex. You know, the idea of this kind of. Holistic view of the learner as opposed to just the what their grade point average is or what that attendance number really means when whether it's. Just whether they're doing their work or there's something underneath underlying and addressing it really does seem to be, you know, a positive advancement. So I appreciate your insights into this and and your time discussing it and good luck going forward. Alex Leader Thank you, Kevin. Kevin Hogan And that's your wrap for this month's edition of Innovations and Education. I hope you enjoyed it and subscribe for future episodes. This episode of Innovations and Education is brought to you by Renkus-Heinz. Quality audio is crucial to create a productive and engaging learning environment for students. And professors should be able to focus on teaching, not troubleshooting, complex technology. At Renkus-Heinz, their hassle free loud speakers consistently deliver crystal clear audio to every corner of the classroom, ensuring every student hears every word. Elevate classroom engagement and learning outcomes with the Renkus-Heinz sound solution. Learn more at Renkus-Heinz.com.