Higher Ed Market Headlines
CCCS Will Deploy SunGard Higher Education Course Signals
SunGard Higher Education — Wednesday, January 18, 2012
MALVERN, Pa, January 18, 2012 – The Colorado Community College System (CCCS) will implement SunGard Higher Education’s Course Signals early intervention system at its 13 colleges and online consortium. The system helps improve student performance by alerting at-risk students early in their courses to take corrective actions, and encouraging them to be active participants in their academic success.
Course Signals is able to warn students as early as the second week of the term that they are at risk of failing or withdrawing from a course. It also helps facilitate faculty and staff intervention to support the student.
Course Signals combines data already available within campus systems (including student information systems, learning management systems and gradebooks) to determine whether a student is at risk of underperforming. A red, yellow, or green signal is displayed to students within the institution’s learning management system, via email, and within SunGard Higher Education DegreeWorks (a degree audit solution). Along with the signal, students receive recommendations from faculty for course materials and support resources to help them improve their performance. Advisors also can view students’ signals across all their in-progress courses, filter by criteria such as major or GPA, and communicate with at-risk students. Course Signals is built upon a predictive model developed by John Campbell, Ph.D, associate vice president, academic technologies, at Purdue University.
“The majority of our students are juggling school, jobs and family responsibilities, so their time is very limited. Course Signals will give them a quick and easy way to understand where they are falling short and what the college can offer to help them be successful, and do so early enough to salvage their semester,” said Diana Doyle, president, Arapahoe Community College. “I also think it will encourage students to be active participants in their own academic success. It alerts them to behavior changes they can make in order to be successful long term.”
In addition to facilitating early alerts and intervention, there were other factors that made Course Signals the solution of choice among CCCS’ presidents and administrators. Among them are the integration of the solution to SunGard Higher Education Banner and DegreeWorks, enabling CCCS to leverage its existing investment in its existing administrative system and degree audit software, and the ease of use for faculty as well as students. Many of the colleges within CCCS offer courses with an online component so faculty are already accustomed to communicating with students electronically.
“Currently, our faculty must go through a manual, time-consuming process to evaluate how each student is doing,” said Julie Ouska, chief information officer of CCCS. “Course Signals will provide tools for faculty to reach out to students at risk without a tremendous amount of work, and do so consistently and in a timely manner. It also gives them a tool to easily reinforce and encourage the students who are doing well. The simplicity was an important factor for us; we need a solution that all the colleges in the system can use easily and effectively.”
“Institutions are facing increased pressure to improve retention and graduation rates. In order to move the needle, they need to improve student success at the course level and as early as possible,” said Tom Wagner, vice president of product management and strategy for SunGard Higher Education’s retention and student success offerings. “Course Signals incorporates new technologies that help faculty to easily capture and analyze more and different data to provide a clearer view into student learning, and automate previously time-consuming tasks. Its ease of adoption and use is critical to helping large systems like CCCS impact retention on a large scale.”
For more information on SunGard Higher Education’s retention and student success portfolio, visit www.helpeverystudent.com, a student success resource provided by SunGard Higher Education.
Colorado Community College System
The Colorado Community College System comprises the state’s largest system of higher education, serving more than 162,000 students annually. CCCS oversees career and academic programs in the 13 state community colleges and career and technical programs in more than 160 school districts and seven other post-secondary institutions.
About SunGard Higher Education
SunGard Higher Education serves colleges, universities and foundations in 40 countries worldwide. Through its Open Digital Campus strategy, SunGard collaborates with the higher education community and provides software and services to help institutions find better ways to teach, learn, manage and connect. To learn more, please visit www.sungardhe.com.
About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 20,000 employees and serves over 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With annual revenue of about $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 434 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and IT services company. Look for us wherever the mission is critical. For more information, visit www.sungard.com.
Contqct: Katie Kilfoyle, SunGard Higher Education, 315.524.7640, Katie.Kilfoyle@SunGardHE.com
