Community Colleges | Feature
Architecting Student Success: Integrated Software for the Community College
A Q&A with Bob Bramucci and Jim Gaston
As the mission of community colleges moves from access, to
access plus outcomes, campus leaders
look to software that supports student success. Bob Bramucci, Vice Chancellor,
Technology and Learning Services and Jim Gaston, Director of IT-Academic
Systems explain South Orange County Community College District's strategies for
its development of "Sherpa." Known primarily for its success as a
recommendation engine, Sherpa is actually an entire "sandbox" of integrated
software that provides new tools for student success.
Mary Grush: In designing
Sherpa, SOCCCD developers chose a somewhat different approach than you'll find
for many other systems that push out information or make recommendations to
students. Could you talk a little about your development choices?
Bob Bramucci: In our
initial development we chose a human expert-based approach that is somewhat
reminiscent of the early days of artificial intelligence work. What this does
is to codify the decision rules of human experts and automate them so as to
vastly increase the reach of the human expert. We certainly value--indeed we
treasure--the expertise that our staff have, but there is a limit to the number
of advisees an individual can handle. Counselors and advisors are very scarce
resources, so we were looking for a way that we could magnify the reach of our
experts, by developing an expert system.
We can and will extend and augment the system, though, and
we are now also working on a predictive or learning analytics project that is
still in its early stages. But at this time probably the biggest differentiator
between Sherpa and any other recommendation engine I've seen, is that it
depends very heavily upon the wisdom of human experts, trying to automate and
extend that.
Jim Gaston: Another
significant choice that we made was a conscious decision early on to try to
approach our development more as architecture than as a final, discrete
product. We didn't want to presuppose how Sherpa would be used and wanted to
have flexibility for the future. Several things have come about that bear out
the wisdom of that decision. Our use of and needs for Sherpa have already taken
some turns we may or may not have anticipated, but all of these things can be
more easily accommodated because of this open architecture--SOA [service oriented
architecture]--approach.
For example, in the past couple years Sherpa has been used
very heavily for making general announcements. The actual targeting of specific
services, tasks, or information to specific students is a more recent activity
that we are doing mostly in some very controlled pilots at this point. But with
SOA, other systems can be integrated with Sherpa as needed for these purposes
as we move more towards targeted, or personalized, student services.
In the state of California there is an enormous push right
now to focus on academic planning. Our existing MAP ["My Academic Plan"] tool
is a very helpful planning tool, though in the past it was not used to push out
recommendations to students. Now, we are in the process of an integration
between Sherpa and MAP that takes advantage of our SOA approach so that we can
proactively push individualized academic planning recommendations out to
students. There has been a wide discussion across the state, among many
community colleges that are not sure how they are going to address the academic
planning mandate. We were able to answer this question and start working on the
integration and development in a relatively short period of time.
And of course there are many other functions and tools included
in our ongoing development of Sherpa. Because of our open architecture, and the
ability to integrate Sherpa with other resources, we are able to take, for
example, the same recommendations generated from the MAP integration I just
mentioned and insert them in other areas--for example, right in the midst of
registration when students are selecting their classes. One of the key
objectives of our state's Student Success Task Force is not just that the student creates a plan, but that they follow through on
the plan--having these recommendations tied in with the registration process is
bound to be helpful.
Beyond e-mail and text nudges, we also have the ability
to add tasks to students' To Do lists, which has been very well received by
students. The students can complete many of the tasks immediately online
through services they can access via their phones or a Web browser on their
computers. And we have another proposed project that we are seeking funding for
right now, to create a student success dashboard that will gather several
factors that are critical to a student's success and put that information right
in front of them.
Bramucci: It might
be useful to note that though the recommendation engine in Sherpa has probably
gotten most of the public attention, that's not the way we think of Sherpa at
SOCCCD. We think of it as a student success sandbox, where different software
engines play together nicely using a set of rules. We actually started the
Sherpa project years ago when we built a search engine for our classes--that
was even before the emergence of recommendation engines. So now and into the
future, Sherpa will actually include a mix of software geared for student
success.
Jim already mentioned one of the most important examples: that we
are integrating our existing academic planning engine, MAP, with Sherpa--adding
it to the sandbox. And the new predictive analytics work we are starting will
add a math layer to the human expertise layer of Sherpa. So we see Sherpa as
very extensible. And as Jim pointed out, Sherpa is not a single product--it's a
student success software sandbox where several software engines can collaborate
towards the goal of student success.
When we originally chose our metaphor for Sherpa, it was the
Sherpas of Nepal, who selflessly help other people reach their dreams--the
Sherpas are content to stay in the background. Getting back to Jim's point
about architecture, while I talk a lot about Sherpa with other IT professionals
and in interviews, and even though everything in our portal is being served out
by Sherpa, the students still never see the name 'Sherpa'. It's in the
background, just like the Sherpas of Nepal.
Grush: It sounds
like there are so many possibilities of what those software engines might be.
How do you guide the development of Sherpa?
Gaston: We have a
design team that is comprised of administrators, managers, faculty, staff, and
most importantly students, who have guided the priorities of Sherpa from the
beginning. We didn't want to open the floodgates, certainly. And anything that
we do, we want to be able to measure. We want data that will reflect the degree
to which we are making a difference for our students.
The whole purpose of Sherpa is to intervene just at the
point when it really means something to the student--right when we can help
them make good choices and act on them. So the design team decided to focus on
a set of recommendations from the California Student Success Task
Force--recommendations that relate to very specific student actions that are
measurable. We can measure our success if you will, at helping our students be
successful.
Grush: Will you be
making Sherpa available to other institutions?
Gaston: We knew
early on with Sherpa that we were on to something that is going to greatly
benefit our own 43,000 students every semester. But we do have even larger
goals than that. We would like to assist students at other institutions beyond
our district, and again our SOA approach helps make that a realistic potential.
Sherpa is tightly integrated with our own, homegrown Student Information
System, but it is loosely coupled--which means that the integration points are
very well defined. And there are no assumptions within Sherpa that the data
that it's getting is necessarily coming from our SIS. All of that means that
Sherpa could be integrated with systems at another institution, whether those
systems might be PeopleSoft, Datatel, Banner, or theoretically any other SIS.
Our hope is that Sherpa will eventually be shared as a cloud-based, hosted
service.
Grush: Then would
you intend to share Sherpa with community colleges in particular?
Bramucci: We are
currently in discussions with the California Community Colleges Chancellor's
Office. We would like to make both Sherpa and MAP available system wide--free
within our system throughout the state. But we are still interested in
productizing outside of the California Community Colleges. Not that I wouldn't
want to open source it; it's just that with the current economic climate
development money is getting very hard to come by, and we still have lots of
good projects we want to fund. So, we are seeking a revenue stream so that we
can continue to develop new student success software tools that our community
colleges urgently need.
While I see that the software we have created is not at all
limited to community colleges, I do see a particular relevance and value for
community colleges. I would liken what we are seeing in community colleges
statewide, to trying to turn an ocean liner around. Ever since the Master Plan,
community colleges have had a role to play, and that role was in a word, access. We joke that we are very selective: "We only accept
the top 100 percent of those who apply." That is very different from most
baccalaureate institutions. And for decades, our mission has been access,
access, access. I believe that we have succeeded remarkably with that. But now,
for the first time in half a century, this system is being reconfigured--now
aiming not solely at access, but for a mix of student success while preserving
access. That's a greatly changed mission. And the California Community College
System has 112 colleges in 72 districts, and 2.3 million students--making it
the largest single system of higher education in the nation. That ocean liner
is not going to stop and turn on a dime. But I think everyone recognizes that
keeping the access while increasing positive outcomes and working on student
success is where we are headed.
Only about one third to half of America's community college
students reach a positive outcome. That's at the heart of what we are trying to
address.
[Editor's note: SOCCCD's strategies for Sherpa will be
featured in a breakout session presented by Bob Bramucci and Jim Gaston at Campus Technology Forum 2013 in San Diego, April 29-May 1.]
