Western Governor’s University (WGU) announced last week that it will use the Aera Decision Cloud to assist with student support. The platform will sort through academic activity data at the entirely online institution and use it to recommend courses of action to assist students in need.
“With nearly 1.1 million online students in the U.S. and retention rates 20 percent lower for online and adult learners across the higher-ed landscape, there’s a clear opportunity to improve outcomes,” Joe Dery, vice president and dean of WGU’s School of Technology, wrote in an email to Government Technology. “We know that timely outreach can significantly enhance student persistence, and by evolving our approach, we can better deliver this support at scale within our flexible education model.”
WGU is an online higher education institution that uses competency, rather than credit hours, to measure student progress. Dery said that rapidly increasing enrollment and growing diversity in the student population prompted the school to look for new tools and methods to meet students’ needs.
WGU collected data from more than 100,000 students in 2020 and 2021 and found that “timely faculty outreach led to higher course completion rates and lower drop rates, especially among underserved populations,” Dery said in an email. The news release said 74 percent of WGU’s 176,000 students come from at least one underserved population.
Students at WGU have course instructors, program mentors and a variety of support teams in their corner. Dery said that WGU has extensive data on academic activity to identify trends among student behavior and predict which students may need help, and it has used that data for specific use cases in the past. With the Aera partnership, he hopes the data can contribute to a more unified, comprehensive system and provide individualized support at a scale that teams of people may not be able to do.
“While decision intelligence (DI) is often associated with optimizing business operations, particularly in complex supply chains and procurement ecosystems, its principles translate remarkably well to the educational sector,” Dery wrote.
Where, in the business world, DI helps companies meet their goals of moving orders smoothly through various systems, Dery said DI could help WGU students progress smoothly in their academic journeys and get past obstacles to their learning. Economic barriers, environmental barriers like natural disasters or even COVID-19, and more day-to-day barriers, like waiting for faculty office hours to ask a question, could all slow a student’s progress.
In addition to locating students who may need help, the Decision Cloud will help find individualized paths forward for students, taking into account the student’s background, personal history, learning style and more. For example, it may suggest a sequence of courses or a library of learning resources that align with the student’s learning goals and preferences.
“This approach allows us to guide students toward the most achievable paths, helping them avoid unnecessary challenges, such as difficulties in getting timely support when they need it (even during overnight hours) or navigating cumbersome processes like term planning,” Dery said.
The university has not announced a timeline for implementation.
