When it comes to flexibility, colleges and universities are rarely the places you’d expect to find it. Sadly, this rigidity is the reason many students drop out of school before completing their degree programs.
But things are changing, thanks to ongoing technological innovation and the rise of data-driven decision-making in higher ed. Taking advantage of new technologies can help your institution improve student retention rates, graduation rates, and more by unlocking more opportunities for flexibility in education.
In the context of higher education, flexibility refers to an institution’s ability to adapt its offerings to meet students’ needs while maintaining its high standard of academic rigor. Those adaptations could take many forms, from allowing students to submit an assignment late to building individualized courses of study for students with unique interests.
According to a recent survey by Inside Higher Ed and New Student Voice, some of the most important elements of flexibility include:
When flexible options are available, students have a better chance of staying engaged and achieving the learning outcomes they need to progress in their courses of study and, eventually, their careers.
Providing a degree of flexibility is critical for maintaining high student engagement — a critical consideration for success. Flexible arrangements help re-engage students who are at risk of dropping out, especially in nontraditional populations such as veterans and working parents.
Other benefits of a flexible learning experience include:
Flexibility can come in many different forms, depending on the resources available to the institution, the preferences of the faculty or administrators involved, and the needs of the student. Ultimately, though, some degree of flexibility is essential for ensuring all students have the chance to shine.
Here are some realistic suggestions for how to offer flexibility to students from all backgrounds.
Nontraditional students often have to juggle many different responsibilities in addition to their coursework, such as working full-time jobs and caring for family members.
Few of these students can attend in-person weekday classes unless they are offered in the evening — and if those classes aren’t available, they may be unable to complete their programs on time. Others may live far away from campus, making it difficult to attend in-person classes at all.
Providing flexibility in course structure and scheduling can help these students stay on track with their education even when their lives get chaotic. Some examples of how your institution can accommodate these students include:
It’s now common knowledge that everyone learns differently, and that each student has unique academic and career goals. And while the standard approach to education has seen few changes over the past few decades, it excludes many students.
“Personalized learning” is a newer trend in higher ed that helps students take charge of their education by building their own academic experiences. For example, students might meet one-on-one with an academic advisor or student success coach to create a program tailored to their specific interests, schedules, and career goals.
Student data is critical for implementing personalized learning. Insights from summative and formative assessment scores as well as behavioral observations can help faculty collaborate with students to create holistic, unique learning experiences that align with their educational goals and meet their needs.
Additionally, leveraging student success software enables advisors and student success team members to track student progress throughout their time at your institution, making it possible to support individualized programs for students of all backgrounds.
Mentorship is a great way to introduce flexibility into your institution, especially for students from nontraditional backgrounds.
For example military students — including veterans and active-duty service members — often experience challenges in the transition from regimented military life to the self-paced culture of academia. They’re also usually older than traditional college students, with personal and professional responsibilities their peers don’t have.
This culture shock often makes military students feel isolated from their institutions, which can interfere with their ability to access the resources they need to help them get through their programs. Sometimes, the best way to accommodate these at-risk students is to provide opportunities to connect with their academic peers and faculty members.
Mentors can guide at-risk students toward helpful campus resources and provide valuable advice on maintaining a healthy school-life balance, choosing courses, working toward a promising career, and more.
The greatest impact on student engagement comes from your faculty. Most students interact with their professors more than anyone else on campus, both in and out of the classroom, which builds a rapport and establishes a sense of trust.
As a result, instructors are the ones who are most often tasked with devising flexible arrangements for individual students. Faculty should be open to making accommodations every so often to help students who are struggling to stay on track, but it’s also important for them to strike a balance between academic rigor and flexibility.
Therefore, the degree of flexibility each professor can provide will vary depending on academic discipline, course requirements, department policies, and the instructor’s own preferences. Regular participation in a hands-on chemistry lab, for example, is significantly more important for achieving the desired learning outcomes than it is in an English literature seminar.
Most institutions already use at least one form of digital educational technology (edtech), such as a learning management system (LMS).
And while these programs can help streamline learning for students, using multiple disparate systems can limit visibility into student records and reduce your ability to determine the best course of action for each student’s situation.
Creating communicative pathways between the software programs your institution uses can help you consolidate your tech stack and save some extra money that can be allocated to other areas of your institution.
Integrations with a native mobile app, for example, allow students to get in touch with their support team from anywhere, whether they’re on campus or at home. Student success coaches can check in via the cloud and monitor changes as they occur, providing total transparency for both parties.
An institution’s student success program is more important than you may expect. Student success administrators, for instance, juggle a long list of responsibilities pertaining to enrollment, retention, institutional strategy, career coaching, and more each day.
However, many institutions lack the proper infrastructure and resources to support a robust student success program. Student success software equipped with predictive analytics and early notifications can help your student success team make a greater impact by:
Often, one of the biggest obstacles to education for students is a lack of institutional transparency. Departmental data silos prevent administrators and faculty from getting a complete picture of each student, which can make it more difficult to identify if and when someone needs help, and determining whether accommodations are necessary becomes significantly more challenging.
That’s why implementing an advanced student success software solution is the best way to support greater flexibility in student learning. With powerful analytics and reporting capabilities, your student success department can quickly gain insights into what students may be dealing with, helping them devise suitable plans for overcoming those challenges and getting the student back on track.
Plus, a fully integrated solution enables you to consolidate your tech stack, which can help you eliminate technology your institution doesn’t need and save some extra money for other uses.
Fayetteville Technical Community College (FTCC) in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is an excellent example of how prioritizing flexibility for students who have special needs can significantly improve outcomes.
FTCC has a large population of veteran and active-duty military students due to its proximity to Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg), the world’s largest U.S. Army base by population. Because service members move from place to place so frequently, ensuring they have taken the necessary courses to progress in their studies is challenging without unified records.
The same goes for other nontraditional students, which make up a significant portion of the student body at many community colleges like FTCC.
Implementing student success software enabled FTCC to provide more flexible learning options to their students that had been near impossible before. By creating a single source of truth for all their student information, FTCC faculty and administrators gained greater visibility into the challenges students faced — which helped them develop individualized solutions to overcome them.
Now, though, when students need assistance, all their records are easily accessible from the program’s centralized, cloud-based hub. Where FTCC had once lacked a robust mandatory advising program, it now reaps the benefits of custom advising for individual students — and it’s all thanks to the power of their data.
At Watermark, our mission is to help higher education institutions harness the power of data for continuous improvement in an increasingly complex world. Watermark Student Success & Engagement is an intuitive software solution designed to help improve student outcomes using the information your institution already collects.
Deep integrations with leading LMS and SIS as well as all other solutions in our Educational Impact Suite (EIS) create a single source of truth for seamless data transfer across your entire institution. Advanced predictive analytics capabilities analyze this data and flag signs of student disengagement, sending an automated alert to your student success team so they can intervene right away.
And our solution has proven results — within just one year, institutions that implemented Watermark saw a 6% increase in student retention.
If you’re ready to transform your student success operations, Watermark can help you through every step of the journey. Contact us today to request your personalized demo.
