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Data Driven Approach to Student Support

If you read any higher education blogs or news sites, you can’t get far without running into a story about the promise of analytics and big data. At Open SUNY, we are in the process of hiring an impact analyst to help us develop, measure, and analyze appropriate metrics. Data is clearly the “Next Big Thing,” but how we do get beyond the concept of data to the point where we are productively using the information available to us to better serve students?

One University that seems to be on their way to exploiting the potential of data is the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), a public online campus serving around 85,000 students around the world (UMUC has a close affiliation with the US Armed Forces, and many of its students are soldiers or their dependents). UMUC’s Beth Mulherrin and Thomas Porch recently presented at the UPCEA Summit for Online Leadership about what their campus is doing to use data to improve their student retention policies.

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23rd Annual NMC Summer Conference

Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence (COTE) is pleased to share the news that this year the New Media Consortium (NMC) annual Summer Conference will take place in Rochester, New York and hosted by the Rochester Institute of Technology MAGIC Center, June 14-16, 2016.

As long time members in this organization, we greatly value the NMC organization and community, and their efforts to drive innovation across various education sectors and landscapes. The NMC Horizon Reports are just one example of the research and analysis they provide to catalyze discussion, inform, and around which they build community. We encourage you not to miss this opportunity and hope you will take full advantage of attending an excellent national event that this year will take place in our own back yard.

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