WBU chose Anthology® Retention Coaching to deliver a program aimed at improving student retention by proactively contacting students as soon as they show up as at risk of failing their academic course. The campaign began in November 2019 and continued running through Winter 2021 to measure term-to-term and year-over-year results. The goals for the program, Retention Coaching Powered by Predictive Data, were threefold:
- Develop a scalable proactive outreach program that increases term-to-term retention of at-risk students by six to eight percentage points
- Collect reliable data on WBU’s current retention rates to inform future student success efforts
- Gather qualitative information to better understand how students decide to return to WBU, take a term off, or withdraw
To measure effectiveness, the Anthology and WBU teams would compare term-to-term and year-to-year persistence of a coached group of students with a control group of students who would not see any intervention. The coached and control groups were balanced on variables that predicted student persistence, such as campus location, degree level, credits earned, academic program, and start date.
To account for the fact that high-risk students require a different level of support than low-risk students, Anthology delivers unique outreach strategies based on the student level of risk of stopping out. High-risk students receive more outreach via multiple channels (phone, text, email) while outreach to low-risk students includes fewer touches. This allows for a strategic, individualized approach to contacting students, rather than blanketing students of different risk groups with the same message using the same channel.
With student risk scores changing daily, the Anthology team refreshes their outreach list regularly using algorithms within Blackboard Data. The algorithm uses data points within WBU’s student information system, combined with daily updates from the Blackboard Learn learning management system, to flag at-risk students. These indicators include but are not limited to cumulative GPA, class GPA, attendance, length of login, last login, previous term GPA, registration for next term, and financial aid documents.