The Higher Education Opportunity: Enabling student success and securing campus management through a robust digital platform
Institutions of higher education are currently under pressure both from technological and safety/security changes due to the pandemic.
Remote learning is creating new challenges across provisioning online content, modernizing the student online experience and tracking student success through analytics.
Unlocking Student Success
Today’s students are well-versed technologically and they expect high end experiences at the universities they attend, so it’s essential that university IT departments are prepared to develop solutions for their students, faculty, administrators etc. as their demands grow. A 2017 Ellucian student survey showed that most students emphasize the importance of campus technology, that campus tech should be aligned under a central app and that it should also be personalized and create emotional connections.
For the academic leaders today, business agility and growth are key to the success of their institutions, so having a digital platform to support cost efficiencies and also help drive long term growth becomes essential.
In working with many university leaders, we’ve found out that most of them want to enhance student experience by unlocking university services/data and making it available through mobile, web and other other interfaces. They also need to integrate student success systems to automate enrollment, assignments, learning management systems etc. and drive admin costs down. With a secure and flexible digital platform like Google’s API management platform, Apigee, they can enhance student experience enabling them to access content and class information through their mobile app to dynamically respond the student needs across their lifecycle.
Modernizing Campus Management
The University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB), a top research university in Southern California wanted to modernize their campus operations across academics, dining, housing, administration, employee & student lifecycle information. Google and Apigee helped them create a robust and flexible developer portal to manage all campus administration and student success scenarios in a streamlined, secure and well governed way.
In addition, especially now with the unprecedented challenges the pandemic has created, they seek to improve campus/facilities management (resident services, transportation, housing, cafeterias etc.) by connecting disparate backend systems to reduce overhead costs.
Accelerating Partnerships
Finally, they’re looking to partners to extend the institution’s learning value by connecting to 3rd party content, MOOCs etc. providing distance learning options and a richer portfolio of content assets. With Google’s API digital platform, Apigee, they can now unlock the value of their data to connect and activate information across organization silos and extend the value of the university’s brand and services by seamlessly connecting to partners.
Take for example, Pearson’s eCollege, a leading global provider of integrated education technology and content that powers some of the most successful online programs. eCollege needed to improve student success by identifying positive interactions and influences, and streamline integration across silos and simplify partner integration. As a result, they were able to analyze student journey and as Allen Rodgers, Director of product platforms mentioned, “APIs are no longer considered solely in the realm of technology but a key business enabler for Pearson’s success in the digital world”.
The Strategic Role Of APIs
Across many education institutions, we see the proliferation of data as key ingredients of a digital strategy. APIs are now a critical component of how easy they bring new services and offers to market to stay competitive in these challenging times and how they can provide more personalized experiences for their students in this ever changing landscape.
Also, because APIs mediate the interactions among the various systems that comprise a connected experience, API management tools can provide analytics to these interactions, helping institutions understand which pieces of data and functionality students and users in general value and to quickly iterate toward more relevant and personalized experiences.
We see API products as a core strategy to expose, organize, manage and secure data grouping them into meaningful bundles that correspond with their product strategy. These API products become the common language between and IT and various departments removing barriers and friction from development and operations and driving productivity for all teams.
In result, academic leaders choose a robust digital platform like Apigee that enables them to drive a seamless student experience on one hand and operate a newly imagined campus efficiently while driving costs down on the other, which is important for long term growth and success.
