Implementation of a new system in the UK HE market for identifying students at risk of disengaging.

Project Overview

The University of London in partnership with Altis is working to develop a data-driven 'early-warning' system that facultiy and advisors can use to support student academic success.

The problem:

  • High attrition rate (in UK HE around 8% of student body in 2013/14)
  • High attrition can affect University reputation.
  • Proactively intervening with students at-risk of disengaging has been shown to be an effective strategy for minimising attrition.

The solution

An automated, cloud based solution which:

  • Provides a plugin to be added to an Institution Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle) that captures real time sentiment which can be reported and analysed
  • Provides daily reports of ‘at risk’ students that are most likely to leave
  • Provides analysis reports on the reasons students have left
  • All based on simple, data sets that are commonly available within the University.

Concepts and Visual Designs

After business requirements were communicated with the UX and development team I began this project by developing a series of wireframes to get a more tangible grasp of the block's functionality.

They proved valuable to the developers as it gave them a clear picture of the elements that they will need to code. For the back-end developer I produced low-fidelity wireframes to show the structure, functionality and behaviour. For the front-end developer I produced high-fidelity wireframes to show content and information hierarchy as well.

Remote Usability Testing

The University of London International Academy piloted this project by adding the block to one of their Learning Environments (Postgraduate Laws Programme). We then decided to do a remote usability testing to gather initial student feedback, which proved extremely valuable in determining the effectiveness of placing the block on the VLE.

To carry out the usability testing session I coded the front-end of a HTML prototype based on the wireframe (Option 2: layout3) whilst a PhP developer integrated it with the back-end reporting system. I then created the test plan and lead the testing session assisted by the University's Student Engagement coordinator who helped to recruit the participants and introduced the testing session.

The session was recorded and after listening and analysing the data I wrote a report with the findings and recommendations which was then communicated to the client.