Achievable benefits

By analyzing their data, institutions can select the most innovative approaches to increase student engagement and success rates.
Analytics can help institutions determine ways to improve retention and graduation rates to improve revenue, such as receiving notifications when a student's engagement is low to try to prevent the student from dropping out.
Using chatbots, educators can deliver personalized content to students to enhance teaching/learning.
With dashboards, alerts, and communication between faculty and students, institutions can improve academic advising by giving students information.
Data analytics can improve researchers' access to information leading to better use of scientific literature and analysis.

Challenges to overcome

However, these benefits aren't just there for the taking, and institutions and researchers face several challenges when it comes to effectively using their data:

Storing and analyzing large volumes of existing and future data.

Data such as documents, photos, audio recordings and videos is unstructured and cannot be stored in a database making it difficult to search and analyze.

Disparate data is complicated to integrate.

Gaining valuable insights quickly can be hard to achieve.

Data validation from a variety of sources can pose a problem.

Data governance is required to make the data more accurate and usable but can be complex with policies and technologies.

Data security of advanced analytic tools – often in multiple locations – used for unstructured data and nonrelational databases can be difficult. Securing a large institution and adhering to data privacy laws and regulations can be challenging.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing presents a viable solution to unify all data into one platform to make it easier and faster to access, and less complicated to analyze valuable insights:

Implementation of cloud computing offers institutions unlimited scalability at a reduced cost. This means a better infrastructure with flexibility, access to data, ease of monitoring, and improving the quality of data processes.
Cloud computing gives institutions increased functional capabilities, such as better data analysis and access to machine learning algorithms that can improve decision-making.
Because the data is stored in one central location, institutions can access the data from anywhere on various platforms.
Using data analytics, institutions can create customized learning environments and better teaching methods for students and improve administrative processes to reduce potential dropout and failure rates.
For researchers, cloud computing can fundamentally change how they interact with data, devices, and each other. It offers them the benefits of being open, flexible, fast, cost-effective, scalable, efficient, and responsive.

The cloud computing infrastructure

The most appropriate cloud option for educational institutions to take advantage of these benefits is with data warehouses, data lakes, and data marts.

Instant Insights /

How modernizing your data infrastructure can lead to a smarter university

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