This year has been exciting for the Civitas Learning product and engineering teams. We’ve been hard at work developing a new course demand analytics solution, refining the academic planning experience for students and advisors, and elevating the visibility we provide advising and student success teams.
We collaborate extensively with partner institutions to develop new solutions and refine existing ones to support their goals. Direct customer feedback is a critical part of our process to ensure we create solutions that work for student success leadership and teams. For example, using an extensive beta phase for our advising dashboard, including focus groups, surveys, and usage data, we collected valuable feedback that helped us iterate and inform our roadmap.
Here’s a glimpse of what’s coming in our roadmap:
1. Improved Advisor Experience
Many of our partners share experiencing a plateau in their retention rates despite efforts to improve student outcomes. We’ve learned from our community that an effective way to overcome retention plateaus is to shift from broad activities to focused, intentional efforts for specific student groups. This approach can significantly impact student retention, resulting in 2-5% uplifts in persistence.
Student-Level Powerful Predictor Insights for Advisors
To facilitate precise student support, we’re enhancing advisor visibility with student-level insights around the most influential factors impacting their persistence. This update provides advisors with additional needed context and streamlines the advisory process.
Current information, like prediction scores and changes in persistence, helps identify and prioritize students who need help. Advisors also need quick and easy access context to deliver the proper support. This additional context, already accessible at an aggregate level in Administrative Analytics, will include access to powerful predictors on the individual student level and inclusion of powerful predictors in group building criteria. This enables advisors to see the behaviors and factors impacting a student’s likelihood to succeed to easily organize engagement efforts for groups with similar challenges.
Improvements to the User Experience
Responding to user feedback, we’re also introducing practical improvements to save student support staff time, including a direct link to an advisor’s calendar in emails and the ability to select students across multiple pages.
2. Enhanced Course Demand Analytics
AI-Based Course Demand Forecasting
Anticipating the demand for courses is a critical challenge for institutions. Offering the right course schedule improves the overall financial stability of an institution and removes barriers to on-time graduation. We’re doubling down on our efforts to predict course demand, refining the predictive model for accuracy, and expanding support for various course modalities.
The new model uses neural net and large language models to predict course demand, focusing on individual students and their progression towards completing their credentials instead of solely relying on course history data. This approach broadens the data the model considers for predicting course demand—boosting accuracy and widening support for various courses.
Aggregate Views of Course Demand Insights
We’re also introducing aggregate views for course demand insights based on feedback from participants in our Course Demand Analytics early adopter program. This high-level perspective is particularly valuable for leadership, offering a broader understanding of trends and making identifying opportunities to take action easier.
Integrated Academic Planning Data
We’re enriching Course Demand Analytics with data from our Academic Planning solution, providing users with a comprehensive view of course demand. This level of visibility helps leaders understand how many students have a particular course in their plan for a given term to ensure they offer the courses students need when needed.
Course Demand Alerts
Set up configurable alerts, such as a course’s fill rate reaching a specified percentage or a course section that has students on the waitlist to know when to open more sections or seats without constant monitoring.
See Our Latest Features in Action
We’re committed to making sure our partners know how new capabilities can help them reach their student success goals. In our roadmap webinar, we review some of the highlights from this year, showcasing the features we believe will have a big impact and make jobs easier.
If you missed the live webinar, watch it on-demand to discover what’s worth shouting about in our constantly improving software.
The Civitas Learning Platform is evolving to meet the needs of our users, driven by collaboration, data-driven insights, and a commitment to positively impacting education.
Interested in learning more about a part of the platform? Get in touch with us.
