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The Hechinger Report
Data analysis reveals keys to student
success
Tara Garcia Mathewson
February 14, 2019
Trilogy Education partners with universities around the world to offer
fast-paced certificate programs in high-demand fields including web
development and cybersecurity. Since 2015, more than 10,000 people,
mostly working adults, have graduated from programs created by Trilogy
and offered in partnership with universities such as Georgia Tech,
Northwestern, Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania.
If a student in one of these programs says in a weekly survey that he
or she does not feel supported in class, particularly if that answer
stays the same for more than a couple weeks in a row, Trilogy leaders
can predict that that student won’t complete the program. The biggest
determinant of a student’s success, according to Luyen Chou, Trilogy’s
chief product officer, is low support. And that lack of support, if not
addressed, means no graduation.
“We know it almost with a metaphysical certainty,” Chou said.
Trilogy’s certainty has been nearly 3 million data points in the
making. Every week, students submit feedback about the course and how
it’s going. Early on, this survey was longer and Trilogy collected data
on more than a dozen different metrics, but over the last few years it
has become clear what matters most. Six metrics drive student success,
and Trilogy pays close attention to them, tweaking courses constantly
to make sure students stay on track.
Each week, students answer questions about how clear the instruction
was, how they feel about the pace of the course, how knowledgeable the
instructor was that week, how strong their sense of mastery was, and
whether they feel supported as a student, among other things.
“We instantly offer help,” Chou said, “either to coach the student or
the instructor.”
Trilogy’s instructors are industry experts, not veteran educators.
Across four certificate programs – web development (coding), data
analytics, UX/UI (user experience and user interface design) and
cybersecurity – they follow Trilogy’s curriculum, which is tailored to
the local workforce needs near each university and, based on feedback
from students, instructors and employers, adjusted to virtually
guarantee strong outcomes.
Trilogy has made more than 650,000 changes to its curricula based on
this feedback. And that, Chou is convinced, is a big part of why more
than 90 percent of students graduate.
Chou got his start in K-12 education, working as a classroom teacher
and then school administrator before working in education software
development and ultimately rising through the ranks at Pearson. At
Trilogy, Chou sees data being used to inform the curriculum and student
support as he never saw in the K-12 world. But that doesn’t mean K-12
schools can’t do the same.
Many schools and districts collect even more data than Trilogy has.
With the right analysis, teachers and administrators can discover
similar correlations between things like student support and course
completion. The problem, as Chou sees it, is disagreement over what
outcome is most important. At Trilogy, it’s graduation and eventual job
placement. But in K-12 schools, educators can choose to focus on
student mastery of more than 100 different standards, student
performance on a range of assessments, graduation rates, college-going
rates, and on and on.
“That is much harder than, ‘Did someone get a job?’” Chou said.
But he believes the lessons learned at Trilogy are transferrable.
Paying attention to data, finding correlations between the data and
student outcomes, and acting on that knowledge can be helpful in
whatever educational context these skills are applied.
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