Nonprofit EDUCAUSE selects 24 institutions in 19
states to receive funding
MURFREESBORO — MTSU has been awarded a $225,000 grant over the
next three years to support its more targeted efforts to help students stay on
track to earn their college degrees.
Grants up to $225,000 were awarded to 24 higher
education institutions across the country, including MTSU, through a national
grant competition called Integrated Planning & Advising for Student Success
— or iPASS.
EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit higher-ed and information
technology consultant, recently announced the winners, with MTSU the only
Tennessee institution receiving funding.
“This grant is evidence that the entire MTSU campus
is on the right track in developing effective strategies to help our students
achieve and succeed,” said MTSU President Sidney A. McPhee, who initiated the
campuswide Quest for Student Success reforms launched in fall 2013 to improve
student retention and graduation rates.
Rick Sluder, vice provost for student success at
MTSU, said the grant will support two new software programs to improve student
advising. One of those programs, called DegreeWorks, will allow faculty,
advisers and students to track their degree progress online as well as run
simulations on the impact of changing a major, adding a minor and other
scenarios.
“It’s easy to use, it’s Web based and it’s a great
enhancement from what we have right now,” Sluder said. “It’s a big project.”
Created with funding from the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation and the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the
iPASS initiative will help two- and four-year institutions launch comprehensive
student advising technologies by 2018. iPASS includes tech-enabled advising,
counseling, progress tracking and academic early alerts.
MTSU’s second software program in the works
involves the use of “predictive analytics,” a student-advising trend in which
in-depth analysis on key pieces of student data can help advisers more quickly
anticipate challenges for “students who on the surface might not appear to be
at risk.”
Most of these students have a 2.0 to 3.0 GPA, “but
many don’t graduate because they may have taken a wrong course or scored too
low in a key course within their major, Sluder said. “It’s about advanced
outreach to prevent them from getting too deep into trouble.”
In launching its Quest for Student Success, MTSU
hired 47 additional advisers, redesigned several high-enrolled general
education courses, greatly expanded tutoring offerings and created key
performance metrics shared regularly with campus leaders.
Early results show promise, with MTSU reporting
gains in returning freshmen, sophomore and transfer students between fall 2014
and spring 2015 ranging from 2 to 4.5 percent.
“We’ve saved about 400 students who would have been
gone if we were doing the same things we did,” said Sluder, who attributes
MTSU’s early success to the buy-in from top administrators and faculty across
the campus.
MTSU’s iPASS grant follows the university’s recent
designation by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities as one of
the five national finalists for its APLU Project Degree Completion Award. The
honor recognizes universities that implement innovative strategies to increase
undergraduate retention and graduation rates.
As part of the iPASS initiative, participating
institutions must focus on three areas:
•
Education
planning: Guiding
students to select courses and programs of study that are most efficient and
relevant to completing a degree or credential that meets their academic and
career goals
•
Counseling
and coaching: Connecting
students to on- and off-campus resources and allowing students and advisors to
monitor progress, provide ongoing feedback, and create personalized action
plans for educational success
•
Targeting
risk and intervention: Providing faculty, advisers, students and
administrators with the ability to better predict course failure and program
stop-out, in order to support timely and effective interventions
“Institutions of higher education are facing
greater challenges than ever before; many are working to decrease costs while
delivering high-quality programs to a growing and increasingly diverse student
body,” EDUCAUSE President and CEO John O’Brien said.
“This reality demands that institutions embrace new
models for monitoring and improving student performance.”
For more information about MTSU’s efforts, visit http://www.mtsu.edu/studentsuccess/ or contact Sluder at 615-898-2324 or richard.sluder@mtsu.edu.
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