Open Educational Resources are free and openly licensed textbooks and other course materials that students can use to push back against rising textbook costs.

These “alternative credentials”—which include certificates, micro-credentials, digital badges, or micro-certificates—signal specific competencies, certification, and sometimes licensure.

Five Most In-Demand Soft Skills

According to this year’s survey, 90% of employers would hire candidates who validate their knowledge using a certification, digital badge, or coursework instead of a college degree.

The messages you send should not demoralize students, and dissemination strategies should ensure that students are able to access interventions with relative ease. Craft messages in the right way, and ensure interventions are accessible to target populations.

Many consider their models and algorithms proprietary, meaning institutions are not involved in the design process or are deliberately kept out. You should make transparency a key criterion when choosing to work with any vendor.

It is crucial to address bias in predictive models, ensure the statistical significance of predictions beyond race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, and forbid the use of algorithms that produce discriminatory results.

Communicate with students, staff, and others whose data are collected about their rights, including the methods used to obtain consent to use the data for predictive analytics and how long the information will be stored.

The plan should also include a discussion about any possible unintended consequences and steps your institution and its partners (such as third-party vendors) can take to mitigate them.

The user needs to know which dashboard answers what questions, as well as understand the functions within each view and how to ask the right questions in the first place.

“The results made it very clear that successful course completion at the faculty level should be our first dashboard to be released.”

have helped Pierce College significantly improve its three-year graduation rates from 22 percent to 31 percent among new degree-seeking students and 21 percent to 30 percent among first-generation students.

Chancellor Michele Johnson said the dashboard was met with “such resistance even though we tried to frame it as being committed to student success.” But, she added, “We had to be patient enough to let some people mess around in the data.”