Your institution is producing large amounts of data every day, and undoubtedly sitting on a mountain of “old” or archived stores. Leveraging data to make informed decisions is not always straightforward — moving into data analytics is not a possibility if your heap of 1’s and 0’s is nothing more to you than a big, unorganized Excel sheet. A deep dive into your data can reveal insights in areas such as retention, persistence, application trends, graduation, and course performance to improve operations.

Our CEO will develop and assist in executing a research project that will get you the answers you need. We’ll start by first looking at your data processes and structures, and determining the relative health of the state of your data collection. From there, extraction procedures to build customized data sets follow, and those sets are expertly analyzed. Utilizing non-parametric and parametric methods, or modeling and factor analysis, we’ll help you unlock your data’s potential.

Your students are at risk of not graduating. While the national graduation rate is showing some signs of improvement, one in three students who begin the college journey never finish — this is a major problem, one that all institutions need to address. There are myriad factors that contribute to low retention, transfer, and graduation rates, but without analyzing your students specifically, you are probably not in an ideal position to address their needs.

Our CEO is an expert in composite index development, having developed custom algorithms to rank the comparative likelihood of student attrition based on easy-to-assemble surface data retrievable from your SIS. Where the Student Risk Index (SRI) gets personal for your institution is through a carefully-designed survey, tailored to your student population, to hone in on why your students are not succeeding at the levels the institution hopes they will. All data collected is ran through a proprietary process, ultimately arriving at a single risk index value and category label for each student. Results can then be used to provide targeted and intrusive advising or other vital services to the highest risk students.

Past iterations of this method have been validated against actual retention and graduation rates of the analyzed population, and tested to determine if the index application is predicting success or failure adequately; Dr. Stimers has routinely seen strong positive correlations between the pre-term risk level and the post-term status of the student. Understanding your student’s needs is the key to successfully retaining and graduating them.

Our staff, along with our associate consultants, combining years of online instruction, administration, and management, will begin with a short evaluation of the most basic and pressing needs your LMS configuration may need. From there, the team will conduct a thorough review of all aspects of your online course operations, including course delivery, assessment, rubric usage, standards, proctoring, tutoring, and much more. The goal of the analysis is to identify where your operations can be updated and improved, with the ultimate goal of delivering better content to your students. Our team recently completed a comprehensive review of a community college online program which has since resulted in several key changes to their program operations.

If state and federal reporting requirements are bogging down your records or IT office, we can utilize the project data dictionary to write custom SQL  scripts to extract the needed data quickly. We’ll work with you to make sure the right data gets into the right places for the specified report. Often during such data extraction, inefficiencies are uncovered, which can be evaluated and acted upon if needed. Further, the scripts, with the exception of changes by the requester, can be used year after year, keeping the process as streamlined as possible. If you would like a block of instruction on how to execute the scripts on your own once they are written, IT personnel will be able to work with us to learn how, as the scripts become your property once they are written. To make the data compilation go faster, we also offer workshops in data file creation, cleaning, as well as the use of pivot tables in MS Excel.

Spatial analysis can be leveraged in many ways within a college or university, and plays an important role in the business world. Our team includes consultants with advanced degrees in geography and geoinformation sciences, as well as practical experience using those skills in the field, including combat and rescue operations for the Sri Lankan Army. Applicable to areas across your campus or business, analyzing data with a spatial element will uncover attributes, patterns, and relationships you might have not known were there! For example, in higher education, your students are coming from somewhere, right? Why not take a look into your application data? What high schools are the top feeders? Are there any useful patterns in your transfer data? Harnessing the power of Geographic Information Systems we can geocode any address data and give you some deeper insights into aspects of your data as they relate to time and space.