Two of Charlotte's higher education institutions are turning to artificial intelligence to learn as much as they can about how to better serve their student populations.
Queens University of Charlotte and Central Piedmont Community College recently announced partnerships with Ohio-based Aviso Retention, a company that uses AI to collect data, to measure student success and provide equity solutions.
Aviso will assist both institutions in consolidating student information, simplifying information-sharing across faculty and students, generating alerts and early warnings for students who are deemed to be at-risk and identifying trends related to retention and student success.
Chris Cathcart, vice president of student affairs at Central Piedmont, said he and other college administrators did their homework before choosing to implement Aviso's software.
"The selection process we went through was rigorous in that we knew we needed to have the ability to keep track of students and the ability to do a lot of work around predictive analytics," he said. "Aviso was just hitting all those notes for us and allowing us to really dream about what we could do with this type of information and the data we’re capturing."
Kristina Siarzynski-Ferrer, associate dean for the Queens University Center for Student Success, said in a news release she believes the system will address students' unique needs. Queens University is a four-year private institution with annual enrollment of just over 3,000 students and a retention rate of 82%.
"The decision to partner with Aviso Retention was simple," she said. "We believe this solution will provide our team with robust and comprehensive student retention."
Central Piedmont has just over 29,500 students enrolled and a 55% retention rate. Cathcart said the college's work with Aviso will assist in standing up its Customer Relationship Management system.
"The CRM will be the basis for our case management approach to student outreach and what the data means for students, at large," he said. "We're not looking at this from a standpoint of a specific retention number ... Our larger goal is to make every student successful, and this allows us to cast a wider net."
