Keiser University

Keiser University Increases Retention Through Data and Analytics

Innovative global university leverages Pyramid Analytics to provide advisors and staff with a single view of where the student is in their academic journey

Founded in 1977, Keiser University is a leader in addressing critical workforce needs with associate, baccalaureate, master, and doctoral degrees in many targeted industries. The university serves approximately 20,000 students at 21 Florida campuses, online, and internationally. As a trendsetter in online education, students have the choice to take courses in differing modalities choosing face to face, hybrid, or fully online classes. Keiser also offers students a very high-touch educational experience, with hands-on faculty, administration, and staff dedicated to them. The university is repeatedly recognized for their innovation and for their efforts to ensure student success.

THE CHALLENGE

Keiser’s learning management system (LMS) uses Anthology / Blackboard Analytics hosted on AWS, with most of their remaining data in Azure. They balance the needs of the student experience, the faculty experience, and the staff experience to provide the best environment for teaching and learning and most importantly student support.

“For years, I was looking for good analytic and assessment products to enhance student and program success,” says Sherry Olsen, vice chancellor of Keiser’s online division. “We found things that might work for a traditional university, but certainly not a university like Keiser, because our students take classes every four weeks. I needed a product that would keep up with our needs and not just work on a 16-week cycle.”

“If you have a student logging in every day, but they failed their first week, it’s not going to show up on any SIS (student information system) report, but it will show up if you bring in information from the SIS and LMS into a customizable database.”

Keiser needed the ability for all their stakeholders to access and look at all their data from all their systems in one place in real time. “When we learned about Pyramid Analytics, we knew we had to have that kind of a solution,” Olsen says.

THE SOLUTION

Pyramid’s unified Decision Intelligence Platform provides Keiser’s advisors and staff with a single view of where the student is in their academic journey. It also offers the ease of use and self-service capabilities they needed, including:

Multi-source direct access to any data at scale with the fastest direct query engine in one easy-to-use, central platform
An AI-guided, no-code user experience with secure, governed self-service for anyone to access data and uncover insights
A robust automated and customized report and dashboard publishing module

“Before we had Pyramid, my deans had to utilize multiple platforms,” Olsen says. “They were running an LDA report out of the student information system, and all that shows them is the students who haven’t been logging in. It doesn’t tell you anything. So, then they must go into the LMS and look student by student to see what’s happening and had to e-mail different people to ask why a student is struggling.”

“They were going into so many places just to try to get information in our four-week environment. It’s too difficult to do that. That’s why bringing all the information we needed to one dashboard made sense. They could then do their job and reach out to the student using an early intervention approach to student retention, which is so critical. Pyramid even lets us customize the look and feel of our dashboards. It is amazing.”

THE RESULT

With Pyramid Analytics, Keiser creates dashboards that pulls information from disparate systems, beyond just what is happening in class, and allows them to look at every student holistically. Using Pyramid’s secure, governed self- service platform, staff, advisors, and deans can pull up a student’s whole academic history, plus what is happening in the students’ current class as well as outside of the class in one easy to use place. They no longer have to log into different systems with difficult log-ins and stale data to get what they need.

Pyramid has made Keiser University more data-driven, which in turn, has increased their retention rate.

“Everyone is struggling with enrollments these days, but our students are staying with us at a higher percentage through to graduation as we are helping them early on,” Olsen says. “Having these dashboard resources at our fingertips, especially when a student calls in, is part of the holistic, early-intervention approach Pyramid has helped us implement with our students.”

“Our deans and advisors love it. Even our annual student survey responses about support have gone up, while our attrition has gone down. Quite simply, Pyramid helps us help students stay in school and graduate.”

When we learned about Pyramid Analytics, we knew we had to have that kind of technology.

– Sherry Olsen, Vice Chancellor of Keiser’s Online

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