The New Diagnostics
About a week into any class at Rio Salado College, officials can make a pretty good guess as to which students will succeed and which ones will not. The Arizona community college, where more than half of the 64,000 students pursue their degrees online, has devised a system of predictive modeling that officials believe can forecast, with 70 percent accuracy, how likely it is that a student will achieve a “C” grade or higher (the threshold for transferable credits) in a given course. The tool -- one of several of its kind -- is intended to help instructors to identify at-risk students early enough that they can intervene.
Rio Salado uses more than two dozen metrics during that first week to predict how well that student stands to fare over the entire course, but some of the most effective are the most basic: Has the student logged into the course home page during that first week? Did she log in prior to the first day of class? Other predictive metrics, such as whether a student is taking other classes at the same time, whether she has been successful in previous courses, and whether she is retaking the course, are culled from the college's student information system.
The predictive modeling system uses these metrics to separate students into three color-coded categories: high-risk (red) students, medium-risk (yellow) students, and low-risk (green) students. The instructors of each class are notified a week in about the “yellow” students in their class, so they can then reach out to those students and try to get them on track. The college says it does not currently intervene in the cases of “red” students, citing limited resources (although officials there say they are working on developing a system to address the needs of those students).
Rio Salado differs in that respect from Purdue University, which has run similar predictive modeling program since 2006, and does keep students in the loop. On Thursday, SunGard Higher Education announced it is partnering with Purdue to market the Signals system to colleges everywhere. Like Rio Salado, Capella University, a for-profit online university that has used a comparable system for the past three years, does not tell students about their risk status. [Inside Higher Ed]
