This guide is intended for Higher Education student affairs professionals, interested in gaining new data-driven insights into how to better support their students and further engage them into an enriching journey.

1. A Guide in 10 Points to
Analytics Driving Student
Journey Improvement
By Olivier Dupuis, Founder of StudentAnalytics.io

2. The Student Journey

3. The Student Journey
Point 1
You create the conditions for a
memorable post-secondary experience
Post-secondary years are more than a learning experience, they
are a life experience.
Students are involved in a journey that is not only academic, but
also a journey of personal growth, socializing, gaining experiences
for future employability, etc.
It is the institution's responsibility to create a stimulating
environment where students live the most enriching and fulfilling
experience of their lives.

4. The Student Journey
Point 2
Not all student journeys are the same
As accessibility increases, students attending college and
university have a diversity of backgrounds, goals, challenges and
needs. They go through their unique path from pre-enrollment to
registration, graduation and eventually employment.
You have the responsibility to support them throughout that
journey, no matter how different their path is from other
students. If your focus is on the retention of at-risk students for
example, how you intervene in their journey should be different
depending on if a student is studying part-time, is an adult, a
foreign student, or if he/she is working part-time, a parent of
young kids, living outside the campus, etc.
It can get overwhelming how very rich yet massively complex all
student journeys can be. Analytics provide windows into those
many journeys.

5. Leaving Traces

6. Leaving Traces
Point 3
Students are expecting personalized
experiences
”Using activity patterns to recommend resources of particular
relevance in the individual’s context (taking account of course,
unit and even physical location) will accord with student
expectations of a quality experience” - JISC
Students are constantly connected via their devices and are a
single message away from an interaction that might enhance
their experience. It’s a matter of understanding where they are in
their journey and how you can further support and engage them.
For example, if a prospective student visits web pages that relates
to tuition fees, they may be prompted to start a chat with a
financial advisor. That recorded conversation could then prompt
future interventions, knowing that this student may require more
support in regards to their financial needs.

7. Leaving Traces
Point 4
Being always connected creates a deluge
of data you should harvest
Students leave a trail of digital interactions on their educational
path. Here are a few examples of data sources:
Institutional tracking systems
• CRM (Constituent
Relationship Management)
• Student card readers
• Ticket distributors
• Location sensors
Social Medias
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Foursquare
• Instagram
Direct communications
• Email
• Chat
• SMS
• Phone
Institutional online services
• LMS (Learning
Management System)
• Registration system
• Online portal
• Library databases

8. Leaving Traces
Point 5
Analytics helps you map a student’s
journey
There are many strategies to capture and structure the relevant
pieces of data. Through data collection and transformation, we
can merge data points to form a picture of a student’s journey.
For example, a student may be interested in registering to a
course. He might ask a few questions to a peer mentor on
Facebook (social medias), visit an academic advisor (CRM), use
the registration system (online institutional system) and ask
questions to a support agent (chat).
All those data points can be joined to trace a student journey that
provides you with deep insights into that specific registration
process and how to improve it.

9. Continuous Student Journey
Improvement

10. Continuous Student Journey Improvement
Point 6
Combining those student journeys gives
you an overview of what a standard
journey looks like
You can get a complete picture of their journey, from recruitment
to graduation by building a student journey map from the ground
up. Student journey maps gives you the basic skeleton of the
many academic, social, personal, financial, professional objectives
and tasks a student needs to complete. Aggregating the
thousands of student journeys gives you that overview of what a
real typical journey is.
But it also provides insights into the many challenges faced by
students. For example, as a student transitions to college, he will
need to register to his classes, familiarize himself with his new
campus and its many services, make friends, find a job, buy
books, etc. A data-driven student journey map reveals
bottlenecks and where it can get overwhelming for students.

11. Continuous Student Journey Improvement
Point 7
You now have the data to understand
student segments
Not all student journeys are the same. So how does the journey
of an international student differs from that of every other
student, for example? By dividing the thousands of student
journeys you’ve compiled between international and domestic
students, you can start answering those questions.
For example, you might notice that visits to financial advisors are
more frequent for international students, but most importantly
that those visits are still frequent by the mid-point of their first
term. Meaning that those students are not paying their full
attention to their upcoming exams. That might put them at risk.
By segmenting your student population, you start seeing how a
specific group of students live their experience differently from
the others and how you might better support them.

12. Continuous Student Journey Improvement
Point 8
Apply human intelligence to your data
Analytics is the process of providing the insights to spark
conversations between stakeholders and guide you towards
improved services to support and further engage targeted
students.
It encourages cross-sectorial communication, sharing of ideas and
better understanding of how each sector plays a role in the
overall experience of a student.
The data does not provide silver bullet solutions, for example
against international student’s retention challenges. But it can
point you to problem areas which are then further explored by
your team.
In the end, human interpretation will make sense of the data and
what it means to you.

13. Continuous Student Journey Improvement
Point 9
Continuously enhance how they
experience their journeys
Knowledge gives you power to change the experience of your
students.
Whether you are servicing first-year students, international
students, social science students, all students, etc. – refining your
understanding of the many journeys taken by your students is the
first step towards deploying the right services to further support
and engage them.
Throughout their journey, students will face different challenges
and have different needs. How your institution provides the
services that will contribute to their progression and how a
student will persevere throughout that journey, all those
interactions are what will in the end contribute to a student’s
experience.

14. How Are You Enhancing Their
Experience?

15. How Are You Enhancing Their Experience?
Point 10
Analytics should drive your experience
enhancement efforts
The student experience challenge are triggered by the attainment
of KPI goals and few leads as to how to improve those metrics.
There is a missing layer between those high level performance
indicators that might give you an overall rating of how satisfied
students are with your services, or a general retention rate for
your students. But there’s usually not much underlying data that
provides insights to explain those results.
Analytics lets you start answering those questions from what’s
really important: how makes each student journey unique and
how you can better support them. Only when you start on that
data-driven quest to better understand those journeys and how
some share similar challenges, can you really start improving your
KPIs but better yet, enhance the experience of all students.

16. How Are You Enhancing Their Experience?
In Conclusion
Work with your own team of data-driven
student journey improvement experts
A student analytics infrastructure is a must-have to any student
experience improvement program that wants to rely on facts
instead of perceptions.
We think of ourselves as your missing layer that joins your high-
level KPIs and the efforts you make to improve your student’s
journey.
How is your team feeding the conversation as to how to further
improve the experience of your students?
Request your free demo and strategic consultation:
https://StudentAnalytics.youcanbook.me
odupuis@StudentAnalytics.io