How Embedded Analytics Enhances Enrollment and Retention in Higher Education
Introduction
Higher education institutions are teeming with data that needs to be analyzed to reveal important and helpful information about their students. In most cases, this data is not easily understood by administrators who, as a result, find it challenging to have a firm grasp of their students’ true identities.
Embedding analytics in an educational institution’s administrative applications allows staff to track key metrics and KPIs about enrollment and retention that helps them gain meaningful insights into their students,’ and the institution’s, performance. Bold BI is the solution to do just that. With it, you can analyze your institution’s data and track important KPIs within your day-to-day software applications to identify whether you are achieving your institutional objectives. In this blog, I will give you an overview of embedded analytics and how Bold BI can help improve student outcomes and educational institutions overall.
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedding a higher education enrollment and retention dashboard
- Bold BI’s Higher Education Enrollment and Retention Dashboard example
- How to embed analytics tools into an education-domain apps
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into any software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It enables non-technical users in the education industry to gain all the insight they need to inform their educational enrollment-related decision-making.
Benefits of embedding a higher education enrollment and retention dashboard
Due to many overlapping and simultaneous activities in educational institutions, an enormous amount of data is produced that needs to be examined daily to get an accurate picture of the institution’s performance. Embedded analytics enables university representatives to track and store useful metrics in one place. Monitoring such metrics provides visibility into the actual status of the university, allowing leaders to pinpoint areas in need of improvements, such as subjects with few teachers, the number of poorly performing students per course, and more. Let us see some of the ways in which insights derived from embedded analytics can benefit the education industry:
- Improve decision-making
- Improve students’ academic performance
- Improve student retention
- Assist in predicting future enrollment
Improve decision-making
Providing the best environment for learners is one of the most important things institutions can do to retain students. With embedded analytics, administrators can monitor key metrics and KPIs that give them an overview of the real-time performance of their students. This allows them to know which students and department courses have the best performance and which ones perform poorly. Using this information, they can make well-informed economic and strategic decisions toward improving infrastructure, investing in educational resources, and allocating funding that can help boost student performance and grow departments.
Improve students’ academic performance
Embedding analytics in education-domain apps helps teachers monitor their student’s performance to determine student experiences with courses. With insights from metrics such as student attendance, teacher-to-student ratios, and many more, teachers can identify students that require extra instruction or remedial classes. They can also use such metrics to determine why a course had an unusual rate of poor performance and whether the number of instructors per course needs to be increased to improve student performance. These insights can be further used to evaluate strategies aimed at boosting the overall performance of students throughout their college careers. Aside from grades and performance, student-data insights can be leveraged to reduce absenteeism.
Improve student retention
Through embedded analytics, tracking and analyzing metrics such as enrollment by course, course completion rate, and freshman retention rate empowers deans, principals, department heads, and others to evaluate student retention rates for every course, every department, and the institution as a whole. They can use this analysis to identify specific factors and problems that contribute to low student retention and devise solutions for them. These problems may originate with the students themselves (issues outside of school) or with the services provided by the school. Being able to identify the issues is the first step to solving them and improving student retention.
Assist in predicting future enrollment
Monitoring information from past and current analyses in an academic institution gives admins insights into student populations, resources expended to run the institution, the impact of those resources on student performance, and fine-grained details on student experiences. Embedded analytics helps executives and administrators track metrics like enrollment by age group, enrollment by gender, and administrative spending per student to an overview of the total number of students registered in the university based on their age, groups, and cost spent per student. With this information, leaders can track trends in their educational institutions to predict future enrollment figures.
Bold BI’s Higher Education Enrollment and Retention Dashboard example
The Higher Education Enrollment and Retention Dashboard example help you visualize important KPIs related to the enrollment of students in your college or university based on their ethnicity, courses, gender, and age. It also helps in monitoring metrics like student attendance, course completion rate, freshman retention rate, teacher-to-student ratio, and more.
Key metrics and KPIs
- Student attendance percentage
- Course completion rate
- Freshman retention rate
- Teacher-to-student ratio
- Enrollment by gender
- Administrative spending per student
- Enrollment by ethnicity
- Enrollment by courses
- Enrollment by age group
Student attendance percentage
This card widget shows the overall daily student attendance rate.
Course completion rate
This card widget shows the proportion of students who finished a course they started.
Freshman retention rate
This card widget shows the percentage of students still enrolled at the end of their freshman year.
Teacher-to-student ratio
This card widget shows the number of students for every teacher in the university.
Enrollment by gender
This doughnut shows the student enrollment based on gender.
Administrative spending per student
This line chart shows the average amount the institution spends on administrative services for each enrolled student.
Enrollment by Ethnicity
This bar chart shows the student enrollment based on ethnicity.
Enrollment by courses
This pie chart breaks down the percentage of the student body enrolled in each course.
Enrollment by age group
This column chart shows the enrollment of students based on their ages, ranging from 17 to 21.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard demo, refer to the Higher Education and Enrollment Retention Dashboard example.
How to embed analytics tools into an education-domain apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your administrative web application for an educational institution. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards on 18 web platforms including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your organization has a website like the one in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
First, create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embedded properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, environment, user email, and embed secret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like site/site1. For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use the cloud. If using Bold BI, you should use enterprise.User Email : Bold BI server will use an email to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication, and you can get it from the Bold BI server. Click the Settings icon in the left navigation bar and then click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click Generate Secret to generate the embed secret. Copy the secret key and paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create an authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in the HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
We have successfully embedded Higher Education Enrollment and Retention Dashboard in an ASP.NET Core web application. To learn more on embedding dashboards in your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code for all the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help educational institutions be more successful. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and begin creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on September 5, 2022.
