Data

MGA’s FYE initiative encompasses three elements – academic success,, character development, and community engagement.

The Knights Academy (KA) is an online academic community focused on increasing first year student academic success by engaging the student in a variety of learning activities. These activities seek to assist students develop critical student success skills by participating in quests and engaging with other students through discussion posts.  Topics covered in the Knights Academy include the following: 

MGA admits a significant number of students who need remediation and are enrolled in learning support (LS) coursework.  MGA saw a 1.9% increase in the number of LS students from fall’22 to fall’23 and another 1.5% increase from fall’23 to fall’24.  In fall’24, 733 students placed into learning support, accounting for 8.7% of fall’24 enrollment.

Supporting student success is the major focus of all the momentum initiatives at MGA.  By building efficiencies into our advising processes, offering peer mentoring to our students, and enhancing our academic support resources, the student success teams that include our professional academic advisors, the Student Success Centers staff, and the academic success coaches, continue to work towards this goal.  This activity closely aligns with the following MGA’s ASPIRE/POISED goals: 1) To increase the number of qualified applicants for the Pre-licensure Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) and

KSU aims to take full advantage of data gathered through the LMS, D2L, for a faculty audience. Our online learning unit, Digital Learning Innovations, has revised their mission to support faculty in using the LMS to manage learning in all modalities and using the data to identify problems, diagnose root causes, and take targeted actions during the semester to impact student success within the semester. The learning analytics solution, uHoo Analytics, is available to all faculty. Additionally, faculty are provided professional development in tool use and data interpretation.

The Continuing Student Communication Strategy priority is designed to establish a streamlined, cohesive approach to communicating with our continuing student population. We have already made progress with two key units—Registration and Financial Aid—by partnering with a third-party vendor to create personalized communication journeys for these processes.

GSU participates in a 7-institution University Innovation Alliance (UIA) initiative funded by the Kresge Foundation, conducting focus groups on identifying student success barriers. Through focus groups (30-50 students), we talk to different undergraduate populations, including First-Year, Transfer and Transition, Career Services users, and Academic Support users. Each semester targets a new population, gathering qualitative data to inform institutional improvements.

In freshman orientation classes each 1st-year student will be required to complete an assignment designed to encourage the use of stepping blocks data.  Based on an academic major of interest, students will research common jobs associated with the major as well as the job market and the salaries associated with these positions.

This initiative will expand the utilization of an academic chatbot in core courses.  The chatbot provides basic academic information, utilizes intelligent agents in the LMS to monitor student engagement and prompts as necessary, evaluates readiness for quizzes and reminds students about assignments and deadlines. GSU received a $7 million Post Secondary Student Success grant from the Department of Education to launch this technology in introductory English and Math courses in Fall 2024.  Chatbot technology is already used in American Government, Macroeconomics and Chemistry.

We are engaging in a large-scale analysis of student success metrics related to curricular complexity to analyze its impact on student time to degree. Curricular Complexity provides a way to analyze the impact of course sequences and required credit hours on a student’s successful progression through the curriculum and their time to degree. Research has shown that curricular complexity is directly related to time to degree; reducing curricular complexity should therefore reduce time to degree for students.

A team formed between Advising, Orientation, and Career Services that will continue to work with the undecided student population. We created a plan to intervene early with undecided students to connect them with resources to help them make a purposeful choice. The plan begins at orientation with a breakout session designed to get undecided students thinking about making a purposeful choice and continues once the semester begins with strategic talking points during advising appointments.