Alvin Community College researchers, administrators and advisers are currently using ZogoTech with Tableau to provide either daily or weekly enrollment data, including a daily enrollment report that gives a comparative of enrollment on any given day versus the same time period in the last two years. This allows everyone on their team the chance to see if they are falling behind and why. Previously, their teams were very limited by sporadic reporting and had to do everything manually, essentially going through each program one at a time.
Patrick Sanger, Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Research at Alvin Community College, said, “When we started with Achieving the Dream back in 2008, we started really pushing data as something that we needed to start making better decisions based on data, and we’ve kept that going ever since.” Sanger said, “Life before ZogoTech was manual. No matter what, I was having to manipulate the data. Our president loves the new reports and year-over-year comparisons because they show her an idea of where we are, how we’re doing, and where we are going. We give all our departments information all the way down to the section and course levels showing how things are going comparatively. To put it simply, what we are doing now we never could have done before ZogoTech.”
Sanger continued, “ZogoTech takes snapshots everyday of all of our student data and builds it in such a way that we can look at a student in totality. With just a few screens, we can see everything the student has done, everything they are projected to do and how they are performing. And then, we can also go from the student-level all the way up to the department- or school-level, which gives us this massive capability to see the data, process that data and make decisions using that data in ways that we couldn’t before.”
Zogotech has totally transformed ACC’s efforts toward improving student success, efficient graduation, and retention across the institution. Increased data capabilities have empowered ACC teams to keep students more engaged by providing accurate and comprehensive real-time tracking data for each student, which gives advisors and administrators the data they need to support proactive advising and timely intervention on both the individual and aggregate level.
Advisors are now able to see what classes students have completed in their goal program as well as analytics for where they stand in their core pathway curriculum, what classes they’re taking and how close they are to completing.
Sanger said, “We can also see if they’ve gone off-path. One of my all-time favorite monitoring metrics gives us a heads up when a student registers for a semester that hasn’t started yet and something appears to be off-goal or not in their program. This gives our advisors a chance to intervene and contact that student, asking the question so they can help get them back on track if the misstep was indeed unintentional. We can also look at which particular courses and students are the most successful so we can replicate best practices across all of our program communities.”
Working with ZogoTech has enabled Alvin Community College’s many users across multiple departments and campuses to leverage actionable student data insights to effectively increase their impact at every level across the institution, which has significantly increased their teams’ abilities to improve student engagement , efficient completion and success rates across the board.
Sanger sums it up nicely, “If we can keep people taking the classes they need in the program they’re enrolled in, they’re going to get done faster.” This is why the current focus at ACC is helping students stay on path and on track to achieve their academic goals.
Some of the most noteworthy improvements that Alvin Community College (ACC) has made in partnership with our Student Pathways and Academic Goals module include notable increases in certificates awarded, year-over-year retention, efficient program completion/graduation and student engagement.
As ACC moves forward working with ZogoTech and the Student Pathways Module, they anticipate reporting even more impressive numbers once next semester is underway. We are cheering them on and can’t wait to see everything they are able to do with all this great new data!
