Guiding Data-Driven Student Success

At the University of California, Irvine, a data-driven transformation is fostering a collaborative environment for informed decision-making. With high adoption rates and a collaborative spirit, the Compass Initiative leverages millions of data points to guide students toward success.

To equip faculty and staff to utilize the data available to them, and in turn improve student success, the University of California, Irvine, created the MAPSS certificate program, awarding credentials to personnel who completed a digital literacy course.

Institutions now have unprecedented amounts of data concerning their students, but how can this information be best leveraged to promote students’ success? This webcast includes examples and an expert panel discussion on how various institutions have used data and analytics to streamline services and communication, to provide holistic and equitable advising and to support student wellbeing, all in the interest of improving student outcomes.

Compass EMA is the future of enrollment management and a key component of UC Irvine’s data-driven culture. This analytics application provides intelligence into UC Irvine’s enrollment trends and patterns, empowering stakeholders and improving student outcomes. One of its key features is its ability to produce predictive analytics using machine learning algorithms to analyze historical data and identify trends that can be used to predict future enrollment patterns and adjust university policy.

The podcast, a companion to the Student Success news hub and subsection of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast, will discuss solutions and innovations in higher education designed to promote persistence, engagement and graduation among today’s learners. This week’s episode features Adelí Durón, the inaugural director of the Latinx Resource Center at the University of California, Irvine, on the center’s mission and how she works to ensure student voices inform programming, engagement and center leadership.

Early alert systems provide insight for faculty and staff to recognize what student factors may make them at risk for failing or leaving the university, but the University of California, Irvine, has flipped the script to identify what institutional practices were hindering students. Through data analysis, university leaders learned the change-of-major policy was one factor deterring undergraduate completion, particularly among underrepresented minority students, and then they pivoted campus policy and resources to better support learners.

Five years ago, Richard Arum and a crew of researchers set out to turn their institution into a living laboratory to study learning. Now they are turning up some fascinating results. Last month I sat down with Arum and several of his colleagues in Irvine (and a few on Zoom) to hear what they’ve been finding. 

The University of California, Irvine has been named by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as the national pilot site for an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by the School of Education to study approaches that will increase our understanding of what makes a liberal arts education so valuable. These scholars will direct the development and implementation of a state-of-the-art measurement project to explore how data from learning management systems and other sources can be combined with institutional records to promote models of undergraduate student success.

We are excited to announce that the University of California, Irvine (UCI) Collaboratory for Data Analytics for Student Success (CODAS) initiative has been selected as an exemplar for the 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, Data and Analytics! This recognition highlights UCI’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and its collaborative approach to supporting underrepresented student populations across higher education.