Page 32 - Campus Technology, March/April 2019

2018
“There are nine different definitions for what a first-generation college student is,” he said. For example, among the students who work in the Assessment and Planning office as interns (all of whom are first-generation), one has a moth- er who’s an immigrant and a father who never attended college. Yet his older brother is also a student at the university. “Having an older sib- ling who attended college at all, even not here, that’s a protective factor. Having a parent who attended some college but did not graduate, that’s more of a protective factor than having a parent who didn’t attend college at all.”
His point is this: Traditional statistics have always forced analysis of large groups. “With cognitive analytics you’re able to get to the indi- vidual student level. We’re able to say that having an older sibling attending our university is a pro- tective factor. We can get very nuanced here.”
Besides IBM Watson and various statistical programs, Assessment and Planning has also come to rely on Watermark for centralized data collection, particularly for programs that have a credentialing aspect. “I’m very concerned about what I would call rogue data sets,” Ben-Avie said. As he explained, users find university databases “too awkward to use,” so they often keep records for themselves, usually in a spreadsheet or on paper in locked filing cabi- nets. None of that helps when the professional organizations accrediting the programs want to see evidence of competence.
By using Watermark, all of that data is brought together “in a safe, secure place,” he noted. As students do field work or other proj- ects related to their programs, faculty can han- dle evaluations digitally and pass them through the entire workflow, with feedback going into the student’s own portfolio. When a student is required to write a final paper, for example, it can be uploaded into Watermark, graded by faculty members, and results fed back to the student. Behind the scenes, Assessment and Planning can pull the scores from all the stu- dents to identify patterns and anomalies. Also
Michael Ben-Avie
"With cognitive analytics you're able to get to the individual student level. We can get very
nuanced here."
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2019