Using data to promote student success

Advertorial by OEB Silver Sponsor DXTERA INSTITUTE^SM

The DXtera Institute is a non-profit organisation that uses student data to promote student success rates in colleges and universities. The organisation provide training, knowledge, and expertise to colleges and universities by removing the digital integration barrier. The focus of DXtera Institute is to develop and scale innovative solutions; to optimise systems already in place; and to meet the demands to integrate digital materials across different data systems and third-party products.

How can we scale student success?

That was the simple but ambitious challenge we sought to tackle when we created the DXtera Institute. Our non-profit consortium is driven by the goal to help higher education institutions keep more of their students on the path to completion by optimising the use of data through integration of college information systems. We are taking an innovative approach to this goal, which gives institutions, colleges, and universities greater control over their data and leads to improved quality, greater impact, and substantial savings of time and money.

The Digital Integration Challenge

System integration is both the key to scaling student success and a long-standing problem on campuses. Colleges need to exchange information with multiple applications, other colleges, and organisations. Fully harnessing relevant information, and thereby realising the potential of student success tools, requires effective integration between existing systems. As colleges have evolved, however, their information-technology complexity has grown. Today, college administrators have access to a growing number of information systems, but they are diverse and fragmented. A monolithic approach to data integration with archaic systems built on an outdated model simply doesn’t work.

A New Approach: A Framework for Local Control

Based on our collective work with a group of leaders at the intersection of education and technology, we have developed an innovative and disruptive approach to access digital information among multiple locations. This approach addresses the market failures, inefficiencies, and distractions of repeatedly developing point-to-point solutions.

DXtera’s solutions are scalable, modular, extensible, secure, and controlled by our institutional members. This approach gives institutions the tools to access their systems and underlying information more effectively — where they want, when they want, and how they want — to better achieve their student-success goals and fully leverage the function of applications.

Our integration framework mitigates the complexity and redundancy of point-to-point integrations. We can build out connectors to legacy systems, manage authorisations, and securely expose data to applications that require it, such as student advising systems, scheduling systems, early-alert programs, reporting and predictive analytics tools, and more.

An Invitation to OEB Attendees

DXtera members bring expertise from a wide range of higher education areas — academic affairs, technology, student affairs, learning and assessment, policy and practice — at the institutional and system level. They are practitioners who are concerned with removing the digital integration barriers to scaling student success. Members of the DXtera Institute benefit from the following tools to help their institutions succeed:

• Access to a growing repository of technology solutions
• Technical assistance, including help in development of an institutional data-information strategy
• An experienced network offering research and best practices
• A growing community of members who contribute knowledge, experience, and talent, and collaborate on solutions
• An annual academy to enhance training at the institution or system level and apply best-practices research

Digital innovation must permeate the business of higher education for colleges to thrive and for students to succeed. We are honoured to participate in OEB17 and invite attendees to accelerate the power of their institution’s growth by learning more about joining the DXtera Institute as we forge a bold new path to accessing digital information to scale student success.

Dale Allen, Ph.D President and Co-founder

Jeff Merriman CTO and Co-founder

DXtera is proud to support a growing membership including these and others:

Learn more, and join at dxtera.org.