1. USING PING TO INCREASE
STUDENT ENGAGEMENTPresented By: Dave Shields,
Managing Director of Identity and Access Management – University of
Oklahoma

2. About OU
• Public funded, research institution in
Oklahoma
• Approximately 37,000 students, 12,000
Faculty/Staff
• Spread across 3 campuses
• Highly decentralized environment

3. About the Project
• Started out as a project to find out why
certain students seemed to ‘disconnect’
from OU at an early stage in their
academic career.
• Various metrics had been reviewed but
provided inconsistent results – something
was missing
• Student Engagement Team asked IT
Security for help

4. Ping Enters the Loop
• At least 75% of the applications used by
these ‘at risk’ groups were connected to
the OU infrastructure via Ping SSO
• IAM Team fine-tuned user data logs and
began offering daily log data via SQL
drops
• Logs were correlated with additional data
to provide a much clearer picture of
engagement.

5. Student Engagement Identifiers
• Looking for incoming freshmen in 2016
• Focus on those performing below the
performance index of their cohorts.
• Also focused on those who had earned
low scores on mid-terms and some
additional identifiers.

6. Non-Ping Tools
• Student Engagement team used “Rstats”
to pull query of cohorts
• Merged with Student Records (Banner)
• Tableau used for data visualization
• Very simple data correlations added to
Learning Management System

7. Challenges
• Not all students used Learning
Management Software (i.e. performance
arts)
• Class assignments, teachers, degree
program, etc. were not always clear
indications of performance
• Some students spent large amounts of
time doing their work outside of the
connected applications but would trigger
anyway.

8. Results
• Provided several students the resources
they needed to re-engage the university
• Great teamwork opportunity for Academic
Advising to work with Academic
Engagement
• Boosted student retention rate to
approximately 90%

9. Future
• The same program will begin again in Fall
2017 but collection will start two weeks
prior to the last program
• More applications will be in Ping and
thusly more data will be provided to
measure engagement
• If all goes well, the hope is to beat the last
year’s record (90%) or at least match it.

10. Applying The Knowledge
• Consider the technical connections to your
Ping infrastructure as a good measure of
connectivity (technical and personal).
• Look for unique patterns in behaviors and
determine if more could be done to help
some groups or reduce hassle for others.
• Use collected metrics as a training tool for
other teams.

11. Need more help?
Keep in Touch!
• Slides Available at the
end of this presentation
• Email: dshields@ou.edu
• LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/i
n/daveshieldsok/