As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education is facing an uncertain path. Even with the overall economy on high alert, most experts would agree that the full impact of the pandemic has yet to be felt. Institutions are facing challenges to their business model, including declines in state funding, questionable enrollments, and uncertain endowment returns. The additional costs needed to deal with the crisis could be material.
As a result of the rapid response to COVID-19 this spring, many institutions were forced to become fully virtual almost overnight. Without an efficient means of extracting, organizing and presenting LMS data, administrators were left with complex and time-consuming incremental database queries and manual manipulation of data.
In partnership with our clients, we developed the LMS Explorer Kit to allow institutions to extract data from their Learning Management System (LMS), including instructor and student course activity, and create a series of data visualizations to help inform action and decision-making around deployment, training, course development and usage. The LMS Explorer Kit includes the code to extract data from Canvas and Blackboard Learn. A sample dashboards is below:
“Disruption” and “disruptive innovation” are common themes among higher education watchers and analysts. The current pandemic was not the type of disruption that was predicted but certainly is causing more disruption than could have been imagined in such a short period of time.
Cost benchmarking capabilities support institutional transformation and accelerate financial sustainability.
