LSBU invests £14m to transform student experience through personalised education
LSBU will invest more than £14 million in IBM's Exceptional Student Experience, which uses a mix of analytics, mobile, social and security solutions built on cloud infrastructure to monitor academic progress of individual studentsEnsuring each student has the support they need to graduate and secure employment is fundamental to LSBU's purpose, and the new platform will augment students' learning experience and help the university achieve its digital transformation goals.
This will be achieved by delivering a personalised engagement from the application process, throughout their student life, to graduation and beyond.
"The key benefit of this change programme is that it will enable LSBU to identify students who require support to complete their studies, and underpin our platform to enable repeatable, predictable, reliable and scalable technology-enabled learning for our students at the best value-for-money," said Professor Phil Cardew, Pro Vice Chancellor at LSBU.
LSBU's investment in IBM's Exceptional Student Experience will lead to up-to-date collaboration, a greater diversity of provision and more variety in modes of learning including mobile access to applications, social communities for knowledge sharing, online profiling, and dynamic learning environments. Combined, this can improve teaching, assessment, feedback and student preparation for the world of work.
To support the introduction of the programme, LSBU's entire IT environment will move to SoftLayer, an IBM company cloud computing platform. Adopting a cloud strategy will greatly increase the university's agility, enabling educators and administrators to offer new services to students at busy times at a much faster rate. In addition, by moving the infrastructure online the space taken by the original data centres will now be transformed into additional teaching space.
IBM will deliver the Exceptional Student Experience solution via the SoftLayer platform, which will align with predictive analytics for student retention and social collaboration for richer curriculum delivery, all accessed through a personalised digital portal offering to provide on-demand learning. The IBM solution will allow LSBU to be interconnected and intelligent when monitoring students' academic progress, creating a holistic overview for every single student's learning experience.
Through predictive analytics, Exceptional Student Experience will enable LSBU to identify students who may require additional support with their studies, and will enable them to intervene with those students to offer any help that may be needed.
"The use of big data, deep content analytics and social technologies delivered via SoftLayer's cloud holds the promise of enabling a truly personalised and exceptional educational experience, which has the potential to transform the entire education industry," said Michael D. King, Vice President, Global Education Industry at IBM.