In the fall of 2020, institutions struggled to grow student enrollment. The difficulty further increased when they were unable to retain students. So, an overall decrease in institutional growth was seeping down all the districts in the USA.
Interestingly, this degrowth in enrollment was only shown in the community colleges. The private educational institutions were, on the other hand, increasing enrollment rapidly. Such disparity was a rare occurrence.
The pandemic started impacting student enrollment status. It’s been 4 years since 2020. The graph is still not rising. After meticulous research by the experts, the root cause behind this stagnation is discovered but not broadly addressed.
The experts found that the more easily institutions adapted to using technology, the more successful they became in retaining and growing students.
Now, the question is how the institutions understood the trend and made it effective. They did it with action analytics.
There are two kinds of data analytics in education; accountability analytics and action analytics. Your institution’s growth depends on which analytics you make functional across the departments.
What Is Accountability Analytics?
If you use data to determine what went wrong in the last session and the reason behind the students’ poor performance, you rely on accountability analytics.
This is a data-driven approach used to measure organizational or individual performance against predefined goals. It ensures transparency by holding stakeholders accountable for outcomes and fostering a culture of responsibility.
For instance, accountability analytics track teacher performance by analyzing student grades, attendance, and feedback. Now, the data highlights areas for improvement, such as teaching methods or resource allocation if students underperform in a specific class.
What Is Action Analytics?
Action analytics joins the dots further when the steps of accountability analytics are completed. It further increases your understanding of your actions with real-time data, predictive modeling, and actionable recommendations. Unlike conventional methods that primarily report past performance, action analytics identifies patterns and trends, enabling administrators to make proactive decisions.
So, while accountability analytics only notes a decline in enrollment and identifies the reasons behind the decline, action analytics goes deeper. It offers targeted solutions for specific issues, such as scholarships for financial barriers, initiating marketing campaigns to solve lack of engagement, and refining communication strategies for competition.
Action analytics sets itself apart by suggesting actionable components. It goes a step further than diagnosing problems; it empowers institutions to resolve them effectively.
5 Ways Action Analytics Helps Institutions Identify the Real Crisis
The education sector is obsessed with “Autopsy analytics” meaning we love to focus on what’s already been done and the damage we cannot repair anymore. This nurtures a culture of blaming each other, reactive decision-making, and attention to quantity over quality. Making a shift to action analytics is a continuous process. But, before learning more about building a culture of action analytics, find out how the practice helps your institutional growth.
Uncovering Hidden Student Performance Trends
Teachers are held responsible when students fail to perform up to the mark. The management often puts the entire blame on the teacher though the root cause is something else.
How Action Analytics Helps
Action analytics helps you introspect focusing on the loopholes in your operational steps. It correlates student performance with attendance, grades, engagement levels, learning outcomes, and fee payment status.
Example
Suppose, a student is facing financial issues, they cannot perform at their best. This analytical approach lets you take action based on your findings. By pinpointing the trends early, you can intervene with personalized support, preventing long-term impacts on student success.
Identifying Resource Allocation Inefficiencies
Budget constraints indeed hinder proper resource allocation across departments. Often administrators fail to analyze the budget requirement. Therefore, a disparity in budget allocation is a common occurrence leading to an imbalance in growth.
How Action Analytics Helps
Action analytics examines how resources like faculty time, infrastructure, and technology are utilized. Analytics highlights inefficiencies if certain departments or programs show suboptimal performance despite significant investments.
Example
For example, it may reveal reasons behind low enrollment in certain courses stem from outdated curricula, prompting targeted improvements.
Similarly, it will highlight when a course performs better than expected maximizing the allocated budget.
Addressing Enrollment Challenges with Prediction
As soon as the enrollment graph steeps, accountability analytics interprets it as the marketing team’s failure.
How Action Analytics Helps
Unlike accountability analytics, action analytics uses historical and real-time data to forecast enrollment trends.
Example
Action analytics suggests probable solutions taking all broader perspectives like economic conditions, geographic demographics, or shifts in student preferences impacting enrollment into consideration. This approach helps institutions with targeted recruitment strategies, redesign programs, or offer financial aid packages to attract and retain students with these insights.
Monitoring Student Well-Being and Engagement
Disengagement resulting from imbalanced mental health is a growing concern in education. Accountability analytics often fail to address these issues of being unable to connect the dots.
How Action Analytics Helps
Action analytics fixes this with non-academic data such as extracurricular participation, and counseling records. Besides keeping a student’s attendance in check, this data helps institutions gauge student well-being.
Example
For instance, a sudden drop in social activity might indicate burnout or emotional distress. Schools can introduce wellness programs, peer support networks, or additional counseling resources to mitigate crises before they become unmanageable provided they know student’s non-academic lifestyles.
Enhancing Crisis Response Strategies
Accountability analytics focus on past activities to assess the present situation. Therefore, it cannot see beyond a predestined goal.
How Action Analytics Helps
On the other hand, action analytics work with real-time data. So, it progresses further by predicting and sometimes setting the trend. Action analytics liberates you from the burden of accountability. Therefore, you can think beyond ‘what’s going on in the classes’ and design curricula based on future-driven subjects that help your institutional growth.
Example
For instance, during the pandemic, analytics tracked infection rates, determined safe reopening timelines, and identified students struggling with remote learning in these institutions. These data-driven insights ensured institutions adapt effectively while prioritizing safety and continuity.
How to Implement a Culture of Action Analytics in Your Institution
A shift to action analytics from accountability analytics is difficult. Though establishing an action analytics approach is time-consuming, it’s possible with consistent practice. Follow these steps:
Establish a Culture of Leadership
Accountability analytics create a barrier by holding a person responsible for mismanagement. This hinders a person’s spontaneous urge to join the teamwork and produce value for the organization. The entire workforce becomes an answerable machinery that works to fulfill the target set by the seniors.
The journey towards a data-driven culture begins with the commitment of institutional leaders. The change starts to reflect when the administrators, department heads, and faculty members can relate their personal growth with institutional growth. Innovation is the only key to seeing the bigger picture.
Conduct workshops and presentations highlighting success stories from other institutions, emphasizing how analytics can transform learning and operational outcomes. Once adapted to action analytics, people work as leaders and analyze the outcomes before taking up any project. Data-driven goals help them set a mission for continuous institutional growth.
Define Clear Objectives
Clear and measurable objectives are imperative for successful implementation. The goal may be set for a better student retention plan, enhancing faculty performance, or streamlining administrative tasks. Well-defined targets provide focus and direction. Use these objectives to align stakeholders and ensure everyone understands the purpose behind adopting action analytics.
Here comes the importance of interoperability. Interoperability lets everyone have access to data from a unified source. When every software in your institution – be it software to manage students, lesson plans, employees, or payment-related subjects – is knit into one string, it becomes easier to understand goals and work together towards them.
Invest in the Right Tools and Technologies
Choosing the appropriate analytics platform is key to building a strong foundation. An education management software that is AI-integrated and offers easy integration into all your other systems is an ideal one.
Look for a tool that offers:
- User-friendly dashboards
- Real-time reporting
- Customizable analytics
AI-powered education-specific software like Classe365 offers interoperability with actionable insights into student performance, enrollment trends, and institutional operations. The AI feature on the student dashboard summarizes all the data about a student; academic performance, grades, attendance, and payment status. You do not have to find each data manually. This all-in-one software maximizes your budget allocated to specific departments minimizing manual jobs and operation time. Creating a seamless workflow interconnecting every department becomes easy when your SIS is integrated with LMS, CRM, and ERP.
However, besides a comprehensive tool, a successful recruitment and admission strategy plays a significant role. Collect your guide for student enrollment strategy here.
Sufficient Training for Faculty and Staff
A shift from accountability analytics to action analytics requires sufficient training for the faculty and staff to learn to interpret and apply data effectively.
Tie up with a software service provider with an active customer support team. Not getting support when needed can increase frustration about the software among the staff and they might stop using the tech-support.
Encourage collaboration among departments to share insights and best practices. A well-trained workforce fosters a culture where analytics becomes a natural part of the decision-making process.
Consistent practice and introspection strengthen the action analytics approach. Setting a guideline is imperative to reach the goal. But, in the meantime, do not forget to celebrate the small wins. A continuous reminder of what you have accomplished boosts your energy for the targets you are yet to hit.