Dive Brief:
- Brigham Young University’s Salt Lake Center is nearly 50 miles from its main campus, forcing administrators to be strategic with data to increase enrollments.
- In an article outlining best practices that they say can be extrapolated to online learning, BYU researchers identify six questions to better strategize course planning, which guide administrators to think about how to use main campus enrollments to predict which courses will work best on an extended campus, how to use a waitlist on the main campus to inform course offerings, how to predict which courses to offer together, when to cancel a low-enrolling course, when to offer courses, and which courses students want to take when.
- According to eCampus News, BYU used several tech-based strategies, including analyzing big data to decide which courses to offer and when to cancel for low enrollments.
Dive Insight:
BYU’s Salt Lake Center offers face-to-face courses, but administrators expect much of the correlation they found between main and extended campus enrollments can be extrapolated to the online learning environment. If an institution’s online and on-campus student population are markedly different, however, this may not be the case.
Using big data to guide decision-making is helping colleges nationwide implement better student retention strategies. Using it to time course offerings is one more way data analytics can improve operations in higher education, helping colleges and universities better serve faculty and students as well as find cost savings.