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Blackboard Analytics Suite Expands Tools To Identify At Risk Students
Blackboard has announced new features in its Blackboard Analytics Suite, including analytics to identify at-risk students and to measure student success in developmental education programs.
Blackboard Analytics now offers more than 25 factors that institutions can use to build a profile based on a student's academic background, focus, test scores, and changes in performance to identify those at high, medium, or low risk of falling behind or dropping out. Unlike Blackboard Learn, which can help identify at-risk students in an individual course, the new feature in Blackboard Analytics develops a global profile to help determine if factors such as a heavy course load, sudden drop in GPA, low high school GPA, or low incoming SAT scores could indicate a potential problem. Institutions can use the factors supplied with Blackboard Analytics, or they can customize their own.
Another new feature is designed to help institutions track and measure student success in developmental education programs to evaluate the programs' overall effectiveness. The institution can define custom evaluation criteria and use those criteria to track and measure current or previous students of the program and compare them to students who didn't need developmental education classes.
Other new features in Blackboard Analytics Suite include student and course-level enrollment tracking for comparative and trend analysis and course sequence grade correlation reporting to help determine introductory course effectiveness.
Further information about the Blackboard Analytics Suite can be found on Blackboard's site.
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Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.