Institutional Challenge

• Students have new and high expectations that don’t always align with those of the institution.
• Institutions are assuming the responsibilities of social welfare.
• There is static or declining enrolment, and funding is becoming increasingly tight.

Technology Obstacles

• The technology for learning and communication does not meet the students’ expectations.
• The technology for operations is not optimized to support the students’ needs.
• Data management is not mature, with siloed information and poor data governance.

Info-Tech’s Approach

• Identify the primary concerns of student experience.
• Identify what technology is required to address these concerns.
• Support the data maturity demanded by student experience initiatives using Info-Tech’s blueprints Create a Data Management Roadmap and Establish Data Governance.

Identify student experience priorities

Improve technology for student engagement

Improve technology for operations

Optimize the SIS and CRM

Develop strong data management practices

• Student preference is shifting to hybrid instruction
• Faculty struggle with technology

• Connecting early
• Connecting socially
• Connecting with the whole student

• A mobile first, transactional student portal
• Classroom technology to meet student preferences
• Virtual engagement to support prospects, applicants, and current students.

• Behavior intervention
• Campus notification
• Ticketing systems
• Course scheduling
• Shared advisor systems

• Mandated access
• Transfer credits
• Data integration

• Brings coherence to student communication and measures its value
• Provides coherence to system architecture and data

• Ensures institutional unity in the approach to student experience initiatives

• As more student data is collected in support of the student experience, data retention policies increase in concern.

The chart shows how student preference for different modes of instruction decreased or increased from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic. In general there is a trend away from face-to-face instruction and toward more online modes of instruction. (Source: Educause, 2022 n = 820)

• Student preferences are changing. Since the pandemic began there has been a marked shift in student preference toward online and hybrid modes of instruction.
• Social interaction and academic engagement are the key success factors for successful implementation of learning technologies. It’s also important to remember that online doesn’t necessarily mean off-campus.
• Twenty-nine percent of students still prefer completely face-to-face instruction (Educause, 2022). They represent a sizeable group of students that are resistant to the shift toward online and hybrid modes of instruction. This resistance may be related to access issues.

• Those with learning or physical disabilities will need accommodation for remote access. As the need for technology increases in instruction so do access issues. Also, the extra cost for technology impacts students affected by housing insecurity.

Eighty-seven per cent of educators felt that the quality of their instruction depended on their comfort with the technology. (Source: KPMG, 2022)

• Adjusting their pedagogy to new instructional modes will require faculty support as technology becomes more essential to the delivery of instruction.
• Faculty learning communities where best practices are identified and disseminated is the best way to support transformation. IT can have a supporting role in these communities.

• Hybrid and online learning increases the workload demands on faculty. IT will need to prioritize technical support for these sections.

• Analytics can be used to help advisors know which students to target for support. Sources of data include the LMS, attendance at class, and library usage. This data is used to create an activity metric to alert which students are falling behind.