The vendor is required to provide a student success data analysis and communication tool that focuses on communication, relationship tracking, and reporting.
- The solution needs to integrate within several existing systems to support our communication and outreach goals as well as provide data tracking interactions, student progress, action prompts, and work efficiencies.
- Overview of solution requirements
• Provides student success staff with appropriate data and insights to proactively identify and easily communicate with students who may benefit from outreach and enable them to schedule and provide advising.
• Enables staff to assess the impact of interventions and programs with a variety of reports and visualizations that empower data-informed decision-making.
• Empowers students to collaborate with staff and schedule advising appointments within a mobile application.
• Creates reliability and trust in data infrastructures and collaborative partnerships throughout the university and with an external vendor that will result in greater student success across undergraduate and graduate education.
• Facilitates communication to individual students or groups of students to support connection with multiple campus resources leading to increased student success.
- Analytical capabilities
• The core analytical capabilities of the student success solution should provide actionable data and analytics designed to increase and improve student enrollment, student retention, and on-time completion rates.
- Ideal features and capabilities
1. Empowering student success through a cloud-based analytics tool
• Well-designed web student interface which allows for custom branding of site components (image, color scheme, etc.) where students navigate between the solution and university sites without noticing a major change in site style.
• Enables student success staff to view information and insights on the student profile dashboard, including insights from banner and canvas related to course enrollments and academic history.
• Staff should be able to create notes on individual students, add custom tasks, and view a history of student meetings, attendance at various campus services, task completion, and other features.
• Staff should be able to view notes from others easily based on appropriate access and view student connections to other campus entities to facilitate knowledge sharing and coordination of care.
• Staff should be able to create alerts for themselves about individual or groups of students, and the system should track student actions and automatically inform relevant team members.
• Staff should be able to create/distribute informal surveys and embedded forms.
• Enables the solicitation and collection of alerts from faculty and staff about individual students or an entire class and automatically launches case management capabilities and oversight.
• Shows student demand for various institutional resources and the effectiveness of interventions to inform university practices that support future student success.
2. Reporting and student analytics
• Desired reports include: advisor caseload counts; advisor appointments number, type, and modality; after appointment survey results; student persistence, retention, and completion; students requiring outreach; % of students contacted; number of email/texts sent; student’s last appointment; students recently enrolled/not currently enrolled.
• Enables analytics staff to identify indicators of success and broad patterns in student data, as well as allow access to raw data.
• Desired metrics include: % of students with at least one advising appointment in past semester, % of students submitting a degree plan, % credits earned (vs. credits attempted), % of students completing english and math requirements, % of students persisting to next term, % of students registering for next term, % of students earning a credential in given timeframe, alignment with ideal course sequence.
• Capability to drill down to specific populations and analyze performance of different student populations against key institutional performance metrics at both a point-in-time and longitudinally.
• Desired filters include: class, college, gender, GE english and math completion, student attributes, start term, last enrolled term, enrolled next term, prior degree earned, total credits, degree/program, concentration, minors, course number, GPA, applied to graduate, academic standing, leave of absence, future primary major advisor, holds.
• Includes research-based out-of-the-box predictive analytics that are customizable to identify students most at risk of not persisting to the next term, retaining to the next year, and graduating in a timely manner.
• Integrates predictive insights throughout the platform’s reporting and workflow features.
• Transparency with data models/algorithms and how they relate to university data.
3. Administrative configurations
• FERPA compliance with customizability and role-based permissions to allow access to information based on position title or role.
• Data privacy processes compliant with all applicable state and federal law concerning data privacy and functionality to track user opt-in/out from various communications platforms.
• Soc2 compliance.
• Sandbox/test environment for development.
4. Timely and relevant student communications
• Direct communication between staff and individual students or groups of students through a variety of channels (email, SMS, push notification, chat).
• Automated messaging based on specified criteria/milestones or approved communication schedule.
• Configuration to allow rich html editing, image insertion, and attachment in at least some of the communication channels.
• Easily accessible history of all communication interactions that includes email capture integration.
• Targeted communication to populations using configurable communication workflows in scheduled messaging and drip campaigns.
• Track response rates to quantify student engagement using open rates, click through rates, and completion of nudged actions.
• Generative AI to support impactful communications with students, decreasing time spent on communication targeting and crafting.
• Generative AI to support robust, live chatbot capability.
- It security and compliance
• The vendor should also be soc2 compliant, which means that they have been audited and certified for their security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy practices.
• Sandbox. The awarded vendor should provide a sandbox environment for testing and validation of feature enhancements, bug fixes, and security upgrades prior to deployment in production environments.
• This will allow for thorough testing and validation of changes in a controlled environment, reducing the risk of introducing issues into the production environment.
• API. The ideal solution would allow for symmetrical communication between applications, meaning that any application can initiate, receive, and respond to requests from any other applications.
• Support multiple communication protocols, such as http, https, WebSocket, MQTT, AMQP, etc.
• Support multiple data formats, such as json, xml, csv, etc.
• Support authentication and authorization mechanisms, such as OAUTH, JWT, API keys, etc.
• Support encryption and decryption of data in transit and at rest, using industry-standard algorithms and protocols.
• Support logging and monitoring of API requests, responses, and performance metrics.
• Be scalable, reliable, and secure, and adhere to best practices and standards for API development.
- Contract Period/Term: 3 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: July 2, 2025
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