"No More Excuses": Michael M. Crow on Analytics (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu - 0 views
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ombining the highest levels of academic excellence, inclusiveness to a broad demographic, and maximum societal impact.
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the number of first-time, full-time, low-income Arizona freshmen increased 647 percent from FY2003 through FY2011
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If you are instead trying to educate a broader spectrum of the population, including elite students, and you aren't using analytics, you won't know what's going on.
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We've had distinguished professors in the hard sciences, such as physics, say they feel ashamed that for thirty years they didn't know why certain students were learning or weren't learning. They had no idea of the reasons
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we have infinitely more information to allow us to help students be successful. Analytics are not the end. They are the means to the end: the successful world-class university graduate who has come to us from any family, any background, any income level.
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Crow: For us, to be a public university means engaging the demographic complexity of our society as a whole. It means understanding that demographic complexity. It means designing the institution to deal with that demographic complexity. And it means accepting highly differentiated types of intelligence: analytical intelligence, emotional intelligence. Students are not of one type but are of many, many types.
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At ASU, I could see that we would not be able to innovate fast enough without analytics. Without analytics, we can't understand what's going on, we can't understand the complexity of what we're trying to do, and we can't measure our progress. We needed tools to help us make better decisions—about everything. How should we design academic advising? How should we design individual courses? How should we design the overall pedagogical structure of the institution? Every facet of the institution requires robust analytics.
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Crow: Our biggest problem has been that launching an analytical tool that is not 100 percent reliable creates tension and frustration and anger in the institution.
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We wanted an academic advisor or a student affairs dean or an associate dean to be able to have a 360-degree analytical view of a student
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And so, with the right training and the right controls and the right discipline, we were able to build this 360 analytical tool, which has been remarkably helpful for us in terms of creating a new way to advise students.
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It can't be just the English department or just the football team that is aware of unusual behavior, with no other campus department knowing.
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when the federal government calculates graduation rates, it calculates rates only for first-time, full-time freshmen. It does not calculate whether or not students actually graduate from somewhere else. It does not count transfer students who ultimately graduate. So we have a grossly underreported performance from some institutions, creating bad data that then goes into bad policymaking. We need more flexibility and more adaptability, and we need more recognition that students are moving around.
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There are no more excuses. If you use these analytical tools, you will know where you are, you will know what you're doing, you will know if what you are doing is working or not, and therefore you will know whether or not you need to be doing new things customized to fit your particular school or your particular demographic to be successful. We are underutilizing these tools.
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We're trying to change from the old agricultural cycle—or whatever it is that semesters are currently based on, because nobody really knows—to cycles based on learning outcomes. That might mean a course could take two years and other courses could take three weeks. How can we allow students to individualize their learning in a structured institution?
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Allow them to game and simulate their academic careers, and allow them to engage 24/7 academic advice without having to speak to an academic advisor. That's where we've found the most positive impact.