Institutional Challenge

• Students have new and high expectations that don’t always align with those of the institution.
• Institutions are assuming the responsibilities of social welfare.
• There is static or declining enrolment, and funding is becoming increasingly tight.

Technology Obstacles

• The technology for learning and communication does not meet the students’ expectations.
• The technology for operations is not optimized to support the students’ needs.
• Data management is not mature, with siloed information and poor data governance.

Info-Tech’s Approach

• Identify the primary concerns of student experience.
• Identify what technology is required to address these concerns.
• Support the data maturity demanded by student experience initiatives using Info-Tech’s blueprints Create a Data Management Roadmap and Establish Data Governance.

Identify student experience priorities

Improve technology for student engagement

Improve technology for operations

Optimize the SIS and CRM

Develop strong data management practices

• Student preference is shifting to hybrid instruction
• Faculty struggle with technology

• Connecting early
• Connecting socially
• Connecting with the whole student

• A mobile first, transactional student portal
• Classroom technology to meet student preferences
• Virtual engagement to support prospects, applicants, and current students.

• Behavior intervention
• Campus notification
• Ticketing systems
• Course scheduling
• Shared advisor systems

• Mandated access
• Transfer credits
• Data integration

• Brings coherence to student communication and measures its value
• Provides coherence to system architecture and data

• Ensures institutional unity in the approach to student experience initiatives

• As more student data is collected in support of the student experience, data retention policies increase in concern.

The chart shows how student preference for different modes of instruction decreased or increased from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic. In general there is a trend away from face-to-face instruction and toward more online modes of instruction. (Source: Educause, 2022 n = 820)

• Student preferences are changing. Since the pandemic began there has been a marked shift in student preference toward online and hybrid modes of instruction.
• Social interaction and academic engagement are the key success factors for successful implementation of learning technologies. It’s also important to remember that online doesn’t necessarily mean off-campus.
• Twenty-nine percent of students still prefer completely face-to-face instruction (Educause, 2022). They represent a sizeable group of students that are resistant to the shift toward online and hybrid modes of instruction. This resistance may be related to access issues.

• Those with learning or physical disabilities will need accommodation for remote access. As the need for technology increases in instruction so do access issues. Also, the extra cost for technology impacts students affected by housing insecurity.

Eighty-seven per cent of educators felt that the quality of their instruction depended on their comfort with the technology. (Source: KPMG, 2022)

• Adjusting their pedagogy to new instructional modes will require faculty support as technology becomes more essential to the delivery of instruction.
• Faculty learning communities where best practices are identified and disseminated is the best way to support transformation. IT can have a supporting role in these communities.

• Hybrid and online learning increases the workload demands on faculty. IT will need to prioritize technical support for these sections.

• Analytics can be used to help advisors know which students to target for support. Sources of data include the LMS, attendance at class, and library usage. This data is used to create an activity metric to alert which students are falling behind.

Connecting early

Connect in high school: A key component of the student-experience focus is to communicate the value of higher education while the student is still in high school.

Connect with parents: This means both promoting the benefits to the student and assuaging any fears the parents may have.

Connect with applicants: Technology is key to facilitating the processes required of applicants and prospects, from virtual meetings and campus tours, to video explanations around financial aid.

Connecting socially

Likelihood of graduation increases with students who are socially connected.

Technology can be a barrier: The challenge here is that as instruction becomes increasingly remote, social engagement at the institution will drop.

Technology ensures success: As initiatives are proposed to promote social connectedness, technology will be crucial to both communicating the social opportunities to the students and measuring their effectiveness.

Supporting the whole student

Financial support is the top factor affecting student retention, and 42% of drop-outs are due to financial stress (Chronicle of Higher Education).

Mental health is also a concern with 41% of students screening for moderate to severe depression (Eisenberg et al.).

The responsibilities of social welfare are increasing. This means data integration and management are becoming necessary for using resources efficiently.

Info-Tech Insight

The best way to get students to attend a meeting for their input is to feed them.

• Students can have differing ideas of what success means to them: a degree, securing a job, a high salary, campus involvement, or personal growth. There is a fundamental obstacle when the institution’s objectives for student success do not align with the students’.

Methods for student feedback include:

• Townhalls
• Surveys
• Leveraging the student council and other student organizations

Technology councils

• IT should do their best to gain student representation on their technology or innovation councils. These committees are usually the best way to gain a pulse on user perception of technology.

Info-Tech Insight

Measuring the effectiveness and adoption of these technologies is a top challenge for the institution.

A portal is not

• An internal-facing intranet.
• A public-facing website.

A portal is a mobile-first solution, offering frictionless, transactional services for:

• Course planning and academic advising.
• Financial aid.
• Registration, transit schedules, and so on.

• Virtual campus tours.
• Video explanations of financial aid processes.
• Online meetings with advisors.

• Technology includes LMS, learning technology integrations, and video conferencing.
• The key component is collaboration between faculty, instructional design, and IT.

• These systems store information about student conduct and wellness, often pertinent to legislation like Title IX in the US. They are shared between student services, campus safety, and student health, with data also entered by faculty.

• Campus notification systems respond to emergencies and are common across most institutions. These systems can now be used for messaging of wider safety issues.

• Case management platforms record the student’s advising history. It benefits the university to a have a shared system across all advisors, regardless of department. This creates a single source of truth and minimizes political strife.

• Enterprise service management is rarely implemented at universities, but it is an initiative that can directly improve student experience. Any help desk request from students will be directed to facilities, residence services, or campus safety as required.

• Course scheduling technology ensures students have the right course, delivered at the right time, in the right modality. Course scheduling is highly complicated but has a direct effect on timely graduation. As student demographics and preferences become more diverse, a robust solution is needed to address the complexity.

• Functional departments are becoming more extensively engaged in the selection, purchase and implementation of business applications. IT’s role is increasingly one of facilitator, with clear technology requirements that conform with a future state ecosystem.

• Seamless integration with the existing technology architecture
• SaaS or vendor-hosted
• Meets current standards for single sign-on
• An easily accessible data layer
• Compliance with government and institutional security policies

• IT has direct impact on student experience by providing training, creating awareness about technology, and delivering services.

• Service desk support
• Cyber security awareness
• Scheduling of computers
• How to use the technology
  • VPN
  • MFA
  • Remote desktop

1. Mandated access Legislative bodies are granting students the right to access their information. Facilitating this access should be a priority of colleges and universities. The data should adhere to principles of privacy by design, meaning that the data should only be used for the purpose for which it was collected.
2. Transfer credits Public pressure on institutions to close the time to graduation demands the SIS facilitate credit transfer, including dual credit with secondary schools, transfer from 2-year to 4-year institutions, and from one university to another.
3. Data integration SIS information needs to be available to other systems with the appropriate access to facilitate non-SIS student transactions. The SIS contains the primary information about student demographics and education history. The SIS needs integration with the CRM and other operational systems related to student experience. Integration is also needed for analytics, ideally in real time.

In order to meet these demands, the SIS should be cloud-based and optimized to reduce the manual entry of data and to integrate seamlessly with other systems.

• An enterprise CRM is an integrated solution to strengthen relationships across the student lifecycle. Many institutions will have a CRM for admissions and another for advancement, but not a single CRM for prospects, students, and alumni.

• Delivers personalized and bulk communications services.
• Provides a single, shared view into communications and interactions with students across departments, to improve constituent satisfaction.
• Measures the value of relationships to deliver powerful reporting analytics and business intelligence.

• Replaces shadow databases with a single source of truth.
• Simplifies the system architecture by making the technical environment more sustainable and easier to operate.

From the students’ perspective, the institution is a single organization they are engaged with to achieve their educational goals.

From this perspective, the students expect coherence in their interactions with the institution and the services they receive.

To achieve this coherence, institutions need a consistent and current body of information to inform their interactions with students and the services they provide them.

Institutional challenges

Leadership may be surprised by the level of effort and time required to put data management practices in place:

• Six months of preparation.
• The hiring of a data architect or chief data officer.
• Building a culture of data governance and practice.

Very often data decisions are made based on the system that manages the data. Decisions are often made regarding LMS data, SIS data, CRM data, etc. However, data is independent of any system and data decisions should likewise be made independently.

• What are the boundaries for the decision-making rights for different domains of data?
• Data decisions should transcend the siloes of data created by individual systems.

Info-Tech Insight

If you can’t manage your data in a trustworthy way, you can’t make student decisions that are trustworthy.

In the growing digital economy, governments are legislating specific rules for personally identifiable information (PII). Legacy information systems, such as identity management tools, do not meet the expectations. For example, diversity, equity and inclusion preferences are not necessarily supported legacy identity systems. Similarly, privacy laws are outpacing vendors’ abilities to be compliant.

Build a Data Privacy Program Take out data privacy’s grey areas with a quantitative approach to your program.

As data practices consolidate toward the enterprise-level, IT will need to be concerned with its data retention policies. While it is beneficial for the institution to use data to inform the birth-to-benefactor view of the student lifecycle, the retention of all this data poses legal and privacy risks to the institution.

As the student passes from one phase of their experience to another, the institution needs clear policies of what information should follow the student to the next phase, what should be retained, and when should the information be retired.

Data retention can be complicated. At an elite university like Princeton, 20,000 students may apply, but only 1,200 are accepted. A university needs to have a policy in place to retire the PII of the applicants in a timely fashion.

Create a Data Management Roadmap

• Effective data management requires a cross-functional approach that engages both the business and IT.
• Despite the growing focus on data, many organizations struggle to develop an effective strategy for managing their data assets.
• Effective data management is more than just a technical solution. It requires a change in culture from the business and investments in resourcing, technology, and process.

Establish Data Governance

• Organizations are faced with challenges associated with changing data landscapes, evolving business models, industry disruptions, regulatory and compliance obligations, as well as changing and maturing user landscapes and demands for data.
• Although the need for a data governance program is often evident, organizations often miss the mark.
• Your data governance efforts should be directly aligned to delivering measurable business value by supporting key strategic initiates, value streams, and underlying business capabilities.

Loretta Early
Executive counsellor
Info-Tech Research Group

Ken Libutti
Chief Information Officer
Palm Beach State College

Mark Roman
Managing Partner for Education
Info-Tech Research Group

Steve Di Filipo
Senior Executive Advisor
Info-Tech Research Group