The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technology (WCET) has been awarded a $2.56 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to validate and extend its groundbreaking work exploring the effective use of big-data predictive analytics to improve opportunity and success for low-income and first-generation students. The Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework allows institutions to remove obstacles to student success and improve rates of student retention by looking for patterns that identify causes of student loss and momentum in online learning. The PAR project is a collaborative, multi-institutional data-mining initiative, managed by WCET and supported by 16 WCET member institutions. To learn more about the thinking behind PAR, read “Data Changes Everything: Delivering on the Promise of Learning Analytics in Higher Education,” coauthored by WCET Executive Director Ellen Wagner and Phil Ice, vice president of research and development at American Public University System, and published in the July/August Educause Review.

September 2012  | Share this on Twitter | Post this on Facebook