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"Technology and the Completion Agenda November 9, 2010 The White House, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Call them the Three Tenors of the completion agenda. In one of his first speeches as president, Barack Obama emphasized the need for a higher rate of postsecondary completion. Lumina had already been investing in projects designed to get more Americans into college and out with a degree. And Gates has, in recent years, made college completion as basic to the legacy of its eponymous benefactor as, well, BASIC. (Others have since echoed the call.) Now, the technology section is joining the band - and may be holding the instruments that could make the whole song a hit: data analytics. "This has been building for a while," says Donald Norris, president and founder of Strategic Initiatives, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in "transformative change" in higher ed and elsewhere, which has lately taken a strong interest in analytics. But only now, Norris says, as institutions grapple with the challenge of enrolling more students and increasing success with fewer resources, has the subject of data analytics - and the tools that technology vendors have been developing to wield those data - emerged at the forefront of conversations about technology in education. Data analytics is shorthand for the method of warehousing, organizing, and interpreting the massive amounts of data accrued by online learning platforms and student information systems - now as elemental to higher education as classrooms and filing cabinets - in hopes of learning more about what makes students successful, then giving instructors (and the platforms themselves) the chance to nudge those students accordingly. "