Moving Beyond Business Intelligence: Using Blackboard Analytics’ Student Management Suite as the Foundation for Machine Learning Models to Understand and Predict Student Retention

Presentation Summary

Sara Collins, Illinois Central College

In the modern higher education environment, a great deal of data is generated that allows institutions to analyze and understand several facets of their students’ academic experiences. The structure provided in Blackboard Analytics’ Student Management Suite builds a solid foundation for schools to not only report and present that data through Business Intelligence and dashboards, but also use advanced analytical techniques from the emerging field of Data Science to build powerful machine learning models. These models can help institutions analyze how to optimally serve their students, determine which factors are most important in helping students learn and achieve success, and forecast retention and other critical success measures. Illinois Central College is currently using their Blackboard Analytics data warehouse data as the basis for machine learning models in Python to predict and better understand student retention, and use information from those models to guide decision-making in working toward their strategic boldly important goal of becoming nationally recognized for student success by 2020.