After years of researching the factors that impact student success, Marist College developed an open source early alert dashboard that turns interventions into a proactive, rather than reactive, process.
Marist College is not new to learning analytics. In 2011, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y, liberal arts college participated in the Open Academic Analytics initiative as part of the Educause Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) grant funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In the years since, the college has continued to build on its efforts to create an open source academic early alert system.
In 2018, Marist’s Data Science and Analytics Department rolled out a tool offering a dashboard view of academic risk that faculty members can access through the institution’s Sakai-based learning management system (LMS). Dubbed the Marist Universal Student Experience (MUSE), the system provides a proactive rather than a retrospective or reactive mechanism to improve the chances of student success.