Creating a Foundation for Real-Time Support and Student Success

Concurrent Session 4
Blended Equity and Inclusion

Brief Abstract

See how UC Berkeley is supporting almost 1,000 undergraduate advisors in their daily work. Integrating data from our student information system and learning tools, we can generate data-driven alerts to provide real-time insight into student academic progress—helping advisors quickly identify which students most need their attention.

Presenters

Lead Presenter: Andrea Deau, IMS Global Learning Consortium

Andrea Deau is senior director for higher education programs at IMS Global Learning Consortium where she works with members to meet the challenges they face in the rapidly growing and evolving digital teaching and learning landscape. She has a robust professional history serving as an academic innovation leader focused on learner-centered education and experiences.

Co-presenter: Steven Williams, University of California-Berkeley

Extended Abstract

Our online advising platform combines real-time analytics and data visualizations that synthesize complex data sets and make them immediately available to campus advisors, in their effort to nimbly support students. With individual advisors being responsible for the academic progress of hundreds of students, the platform allows advisors to quickly identify which students most need their attention. When we rapidly moved to a remote environment in response to COVID-19 in Spring 2020, our partner advisors reported increased use and significant added value in the platform as a tool that they could easily access remotely to monitor and record details about student academic progress.

Using this platform for academic advising, student support, and engagement initiatives, we are:

  • Promoting student success by providing advisors with real-time academic data

  • Supporting advisors with enhanced transactional workflows that save time and support scale

  • Offering advisors new access to campus data, including reports and visualizations

One of our primary partners on our work has been the campus Centers for Educational Equity and Excellence (CE3), which offer a range of programs for underrepresented students at our institution, most of whom are low-income and many first-generation. Our online advising platform's flexible design and technical architecture allowed us to extend the system for CE3 in support of an agreement they have with our office of Undergraduate Admissions—for the past two years, it has provided CE3 advisors with detailed information about admitted students eligible for CE3 programming, to support institutional DEI goals around yield of these populations and allowing CE3 advisors to conduct more targeted outreach in support of this goal. The online advising platform will also soon be introducing new CE3-specific functionality to support confidential/private notes, reflecting some of the sensitive nature of CE3 advising work (including advising of undocumented and formerly incarcerated students).

This presentation will provide an overview of our online advising platform and discuss how it fits into some of our larger strategic conversations and goals around both technology innovation as well as what we'd like to do in the learning analytics domain. Participants will learn how through the use of learning data integrated with open standards, you can drive real-time insights to support earlier interventions for advisors, and ultimately support students and their progress in time towards a degree.

There will be time for audience comments and questions.