8 ways how a Student Information System support student success
Even the most dedicated higher education institutes, colleges, and universities that have mapped “student success” to their institutional goals face the issue of unsatisfied students dropping out midway—student success remains a big question; higher education decision-makers wrestle to figure out a definite way to define, analyze, and measure student success and to retain them.
With the digital advancements seeping in, it’s high time education institutions try to incorporate cloud, analytics, and mobility with access to all student information and activities from anywhere, anytime. Whether the education needs are facilitating student enrollment, admissions, course registrations, learning materials, assignments, attendance, fees, or tracking learning progress, the Student Information System (SIS) has a solution for fast-tracking student success.
What and why student success is important in college?
Any process that leads to positive student outcomes could be defined as student success. However, the opinion could differ from a student and faculty’s perspective. While to the faculty, student success is mapped to degree completion and getting good grades, to the students, it is often landing in a successful career, even at the cost of skipping their degree.
In today’s world, student success demands a most immersive experience to ensure they are engaged and attracted to the institution of their choice till graduation.
There have been several reports and statistics supporting a decline in student graduation rates for various reasons—unclear academic plans, affordability, and college readiness are some of the growing issues.
Smart strategies for student success
Colleges and higher education institutions often have an outdated and inefficient infrastructure to meet their curriculum goals. They ended up buying new, high-powered PCs and expensive software systems that oftentimes ended up vastly under-utilized. It was even more difficult to develop a reliable AI-built platform that addresses the learning needs of a sheer number of users and the security threats to data.
Today with advancements in technology, and with growing e-learning trends, there is good news. Higher education decision-makers have started adopting the Student Information System as a tool to optimize institutional operations and for a modern intuitive on-campus user experience. The Mordor Intelligence Report confirms that the SIS market has flourished in the North American region, and it is moderately picking up in Europe and Asian continents, with low usage in South America and Australian regions.
The same report confirms that the SIS market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.2% during 2021-2026. Partnering with the right Student Information System vendor can provide campus leaders with real-time analytics and data insights, which leverage best practices to recruit, retain, and develop the right set of faculty and students.
How does the student information system support student success?
Plan students' degree progress by picking up the right courses
Every time a student drop-out or doesn’t graduate on time, he/she is spending hugely on additional fees. A Student Information System with intuitive course catalogs, outlining the courses they offer with detailed prerequisites in a way students can understand, will help students avoid taking unnecessary courses and wasting time and money on classes that won’t add up to on-time graduation.
Prompt student success through student advising
According to the national survey of student engagement, 33% of first-year students met their academic advisor less than two times, 23% of them met their advisors just once, and 9% of them never met with an advisor.
SIS gives students the opportunity to connect with their mentors or advisors to focus on identifying opportunities such as internships, course selection, career opportunities, improving grades, and studying abroad. The academic advisors bridge the connection between the campus services and the students—a connection that’s linked to student success, improved student retention rates, and graduation rates—which is imperative for today’s students.
With advising as a tool, students receive personalized care, clearly defined goals, and a step-by-step plan to achieve them. An easy-to-use Student Information System with mobile capabilities facilitates a convenient, on-demand user experience that helps students imagine their successful future with better outcomes.
Brings student services to their reach
A Student Information System could serve as a one-stop service center to address student frustration issues. What any student most hate in his/her institution is “the runaround”—often due to the inefficient processes of running around to accomplish critical administrative tasks like bill payments, course registrations, class schedules, applying for a hostel, scholarships, library services, mandatory advising check-ins, transcripts, report cards, or credential requests.
A Student Information System automatically shifts these errands to intuitive digital service, where the students get what they want, at the push of a button, with no paperwork or running around.
This student-focused effort offered by the Student Information System—saves students time, minimizes their frustration, and ultimately leads to student success.
Predictive analytics that boosts student success rates
This is an important element of a student information system. A modern SIS with predictive analytics helps identify and quantify multiple variables that are aligned to your institution’s students’ success plan.
Stakeholders can easily filter student data on various parameters for easy compliance reporting and offer personalized guidance to students. Faculty can engage students and improve success by looking at metrics set, with threshold scores. This realistic insight helps faculty know if students are performing well and to create personalized learning strategies for their improvement.
Some of the reports a Student Information System could help generate are about student profiles, credits earned, attendance, fee, library, grade book, assessments, etc all configurable in simple steps.
Student progress tracking for continuous improvement
A Student Information System that seamlessly integrates with your Learning Management System (LMS) will be the next luck to foster student success. Such integration will allow students to visualize and plan their study path, involve in collaborative activities, with complete real-time student engagement and self-reflection.
Students get a self-learning environment where they mutually engage with their peers, take up assignments, quizzes, with immediate options to track their performance with instant feedback options.
What more can make students successful than a tool that slices and dices the student data through a real-time learning analytics platform? With the Student Information System, students have personalized dashboards that display real-time learning path reports, insights about their progress, with the pending tasks. Integrated with effective Conduct Management, there is improved student safety, security, and accountability.
Student portfolio for ultimate placements
A well-executed student e-portfolio can be a successful engagement initiative. It provides an incredible tool for institutions to portray student profiles with digital artifacts of term papers, projects, assessment results, case studies, events, assignments, leaves, learning outcomes.
The robust editors and flexible content-sharing options of the SIS student portfolio keep students focused on achieving their goals. With students having everything to display upfront, an effortless placement opportunity connects students directly to the workplace across campus.
Better connection through the mobile app
The Student Information System coupled with a mobile app can undoubtedly be the best student companion. They get access to all student information and activities at a single place through the mobile app and engage them like never before.
With an insightful dashboard view, students have everything right before their eyes—syllabus, schedules, assessments, assignments, gradebook, with instant notification and alerts on assessments, polls, discussions, resources, and results.
Early alerts as a key for student success
The essentiality to identify and address at-risk students has been embraced by most higher education institutions and universities. The same has been documented by researchers too. A recent study suggests that around 90% of institutions have an early intervention program.
Using Student Information System technology to automate early alert systems, institutions can help boost student success, by identifying potential obstacles. It is true that intercepting students’ behavior early, both good and bad, can be one of the best ways to keep students on track, and help them graduate with a better degree and rank! Faculty even have the option to schedule instant meetings with the parents for a discussion about their ward's performance.
Conclusion
A Student Information System allows faculty to monitor and measure student success throughout and helps maintain a personal touch, which is essential in today’s times. When students understand that there is someone who cares about their success on campus, they are already on the path to victory.
A Student Information System can help an institution by:
- Identify and engage at-risk students with complete student data
- Build an early alert and intervention team
- Measure, learn, analyze, and improve over time
- Develop intervention strategies by making complete use of available resources
- Making early alerts a part of institutional culture through proper communication
Reach to us to know how we have been successfully nurturing student success in over 200 plus institutions, across the globe
