LTAC
Project Group :
Targeted Retention Systems (TRS)
The TRS team has proposed to conduct research to identify the state of the art in North America regarding the development and use of targeted retention systems. To accomplish our objective, we have proposed a four-part methodology to arrive at industry best practices for student retention management in North America – specifically, a literature review, strategic interviews, an industry survey, and a final best practice/adoption standard. This effort will include a pilot of the TRS Adoption Standard at HE institutions to gauge its effectiveness and generate feedback and revisions. The approved Adoption Standard will be an active document and managed by an IMS GLC Accredited Profile Management Group (APMG). The resultant TRS adoption standard will have potential for applying existing IMS technical standards (e.g., Enterprise Services, Reusable Definition of Competency or Educational Objective [RDCEO], and ePortfolio) for gathering and analyzing student data in the context of proactively managing student retention.
The group's work will enable higher education IT professionals and academics, as well as third parties that support them, to leverage a set of methods and technologies to promote student success on their campuses based on the experiences of their peers.
Participants
View a Video Presentation - (Note Large File Size - Long Download) about TRS
TRS Charter
The Challenge
Students’ completion of their courses of study is vital to the mission and financial viability of higher education institutions, as well as to the individual success of students and their societies and economies. Stakeholders such as state governments, boards of trustees, and funders hold institutions accountable for student retention rates, increasingly via pay-for-performance funding mechanisms.
Nevertheless, retention performance is sobering for most U.S. institutions:
• The average four-year institution in the United States graduated 57% of its students in 6 years (Horn, 2007). Only about 20% of community college students complete a degree in 3 years.
• The graduation rate for African-American students was 18% lower than for whites (Horn, 2007).
Beyond the United States, there are parallel challenges in education systems across the globe.
The Opportunity
A growing number of institutions are conducting data analysis, or analytics, to implement targeted retention systems (TRSs) to better retain students. These efforts promise to significantly improve the effectiveness of institutions’ retention efforts by reaching the right student at the right time with the right intervention. Targeted retention systems consist of processes and systems to:
1) Identify students at risk of not completing a unit of study (early warning system);
2) Notify at-risk students and relevant stakeholders (early alert systems);
3) Discover the most effective interventions for at-risk students;
4) Deliver targeted interventions;
5) Measure effectiveness of interventions in terms of impact on course and program completion.
Technology is critical for the success of TRSs by making it possible to quickly, effectively, and equitably identify risk
factors through data mined from multiple sources; notify students and stakeholders; facilitate delivery of targeted
interventions; and track effectiveness.
The Proposed Solution
Leveraging the IMS GLC Contributing Members, Executive Strategic Council and Learning Technology Advisory Council (LTAC), as well as collaborations with related industry associations, the TRS team has proposed to conduct research to identify the state of the art in North America regarding the development and use of targeted retention systems. To accomplish our objective, we have proposed a four-part methodology to arrive at industry best practices for student retention management in North America – specifically, a literature review, strategic interviews, an industry survey, and the analysis of collected data to develop final recommendations.
As of November 2008, our literature review and a selected advance interviews have not revealed a consensus among institutions about the relative priority of student retention among other pressing institutional challenges. It is also not clear what methods and tools can be consistently applied to produce desired improvements in retention rates – either overall, by program/cohort, or by targeted demographic group. Our experience to date re-confirms one of our working hypotheses – i.e., interesting and innovative experiments are occurring across the industry, although methods and technologies for improving student retention that can be considered “proven” are only beginning to emerge. Raising the profiles of successful experiments is one of the chief goals of the TRS effort.
At present, with the help of The Advisory Board Company, we are embarking on our second phase of research, the strategic interviews, in which we plan to delve much more deeply into current practices to catalog and characterize them in light of other efforts across the industry.
Current Activities
TRS is now actively identifying interviewees for the second phase of our research, “strategic interviews,” through which we will identify and classify practices to improve retention of at-risk students in use at institutions across North America. If you believe your institution is a leader in managing and improving retention, please contact John Falchi at the contact information listed below as soon as possible! We would be very interested to have you involved.
View a Video Presentation - (Note Large File Size - Long Download) about TRS from the Learning Technology Advisory Council Workshop in October 2008 or review the presentation outlining our activities.
Related Information
For related information, please visit:
Further
Information
For
information on the Targeted Retention Systems Project Group, please contact:
John Falchi
Chief Program Strategist
IMS Global Learning Consortium
email: jfalchi@imsglobal.org
office: 919.656.0343
For information on IMS GLC and the
benefits of being a Contributing
Member, please
contact:
Rob Abel
Chief Executive Officer
IMS Global Learning Consortium
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