Student success is the foundation of many higher education institutions’ visions. The more successful and engaged your students are, the greater your institution’s impact. Student success is also a cornerstone of retention and innovation — the lifeblood of many higher education institutions.
Today’s technology gives institutions real-time data on student success. Watermark and Civitas have emerged as strong contenders, each with unique capabilities. The right choice for your institution depends on your needs and goals, so let’s explore these two robust platforms and understand their differences.
Watermark Insights has over 20 years of experience leveraging data for student success and engagement. During this time, Watermark has used data analytics to develop innovative student success technologies. Watermark’s centralized Educational Impact Suite (IES) empowers you to collect, analyze, and use student and faculty data to drive institutional outcomes. The IES offers a host of capabilities, including:
Strengthening assessment practices: Watermark gives you a comprehensive performance view that makes pinpointing improvement opportunities simple. With Watermark, you can build simpler, more engaging assessment practices based on real-time results to drive change. You can design, administer, and analyze assessments from one centralized system and monitor progress throughout each assessment cycle.
Simplifying curriculum management: Watermark Curriculum Strategy allows you to build and share a curriculum that boosts student success. You can use student feedback to inform curricular changes, simplify the curriculum mapping process, and use visual workflows that align with your institutional requirements. Watermark facilitates collaboration, reduces duplicate data entry, and ensures consistency of course descriptions and credit information.
Capturing faculty activity data: Create a central hub for faculty activity data with Watermark Faculty Success. This solution allows you to support your faculty as they grow their careers and report faculty credentials for accreditation. Faculty can record the necessary information, while you can meet your reporting needs and simplify complex processes. You can also use faculty success data to update your faculty’s web profile automatically.
Supporting student success:Watermark Student Success & Engagement offers an innovative approach to supporting student success and engagement from one unified platform. It allows you to collaborate with students to create tailored roadmaps to success and receive early alerts when they veer off course. You can get students back on track before it’s too late, which improves student retention and simplifies support throughout the student life cycle. Predictive analytics helps you determine which students to prioritize so you can offer effective student support through a native mobile app that meets students where they are.
Maximizing student feedback: With Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys, you can stay true to the most fundamental goal for higher education — making student feedback the focus of your improvement initiatives. This robust tool increases response rates with deep learning management system (LMS) integrations. It gets immediate results and provides faculty and administrators with reporting that helps them draw meaningful comparisons. Students can respond via smartphone or any LMS, which increases the chances of responses and provides more meaningful data.
Watermark aims to provide a connected campus that prioritizes student success. By offering advanced data analytics, reporting, and communication features, Watermark enables you to use your data effectively.
Leveraging student data with Civitas
Civitas was founded in 2011 and aims to solve higher education challenges by collecting and leveraging student data. Its Learning Student Impact Platform provides actionable data and connected workflow tools to boost retention and support students through to completion. Some of this student success platform’s offerings include:
Administrative and Initiative analytics: Civitas allows you to understand the factors influencing student success and uncover the best tactics to support individuals and student groups. It provides a holistic view of each student and allows you to explore your academic planning process.
Course Demand Analytics: The Civitas Course Demand Analytics solution provides centralized course data, real-time enrollment monitoring, and course demand forecasts to help you build accurate course schedules. You can streamline the enrollment experience and manage course offerings in one place to avoid issues.
Advising Analytics and Workflow: This solution allows you to coordinate student success with proactive academic advising services across your institution. It coordinates student information in one place, allowing student success teams to collaborate to support students. It enables staff to engage at-risk students and communicate with them.
Academic Planning and Student Scheduling: Civitas planning, scheduling, and registration tools allow students and advisors to collaborate through academic planning. They offer student-centered scheduling capabilities, allowing students to enroll in classes that fit their complex lives and budgets. They allow you to collaborate on a shared platform, monitor adjustments, and communicate with students directly to help them align their choices with advisor recommendations. You can identify barriers to on-time completion and track progress to graduation with a complete view of complete, transferred, and remaining course requirements.
Civitas aims to leverage data analytics to enhance student success and retention. It uses predictive modeling to improve academic outcomes by understanding student behavior and implementing targeted interventions for at-risk students.
Watermark vs. Civitas — An in-depth comparison
Watermark and Civitas are among the most comprehensive solutions in the educational technology landscape. Although they may initially seem similar, they do share some similarities. Both solutions aim to:
Improve student success: Watermark and Civitas focus on improving the educational experience providing tools and resources for institutions and students. They aim to support the learning process, making it more effective, relevant, and engaging for students.
Leverage data analytics: Both use student data to empower institutions to make informed decisions that impact student success.
Increase student engagement: Watermark and Civitas prioritize boosting student engagement. They allow institutions to identify at-risk students and intervene to get them back on track for course completion.
Simplify the user experience: Both solutions prioritize user experience in their design, offering intuitive interfaces that allow easy navigation of student success tools.
Despite these similarities, Watermark and Civitas also have some differences, including:
Primary functionality: Civitas focuses on predictive analytics and student success, helping your institution improve retention rates. Watermark’s Student Success & Engagement is one element of its EIS, which offers a complete solution to assessment, accreditation management, curriculum mapping, and more.
Implementation and integration: Watermark integrates with your existing academic programs, LMS, and assessment processes. Civitas focuses on integrating with student information systems.
Analytics approach: Watermark prioritizes continuous improvement by combining qualitative and quantitative data through analytics and student feedback. Civitas leverages quantitative data analysis to forecast student performance and inform decision-making.
Factors to consider before investing in student engagement software
Student success and engagement solutions are more than a significant investment. It can change your process for the better. It helps you identify improvement opportunities and test the effectiveness of your solutions with data. Choosing the right solution is essential to get the most from your investment. Some factors to think about include:
Access to comprehensive reporting
Ability to support student success from anywhere
Track record of success
User experience
Vendor support
Watermark offers ongoing support and excellent customer service, including live training sessions to help you achieve your goals. Our solutions are user-friendly and accessible, which means frictionless integration with your LMS. You can access and synthesize your data from one central hub, which is one of the many reasons Watermark has a proven track record of innovation for over 20 years.
Boost student engagement and success with Watermark
At Watermark, we care about making a difference to your institution. Our solutions go beyond the numbers so that you can always have your finger on the pulse of student success and engagement. With Student Success & Engagement, you can transform your institution’s data into actionable insights. Meet students where they are and create a connected, collaborative campus.
