NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
Brightspace ’ s place in NU ’ s growth “ When we first started talking to D2L , I remember sitting in their headquarters with CEO John Baker , and we talked about our mission and what we do to serve students . And we listened to Baker talk about how he felt about students and what their mission was . There was such an alignment there ,” Pendleton shares .
Noting it as one of the best professional partnerships he ’ s witnessed in his career , National University is benefitting from the brand ’ s broad experience in research and development .
“ Brightspace has grown appreciably from when I first looked at it compared to what we have today ,” he adds . “ They focus on the data and exposing the data that is within the LMS . We get all the telemetry from a student out of Brightspace . Now we ’ re getting really rich insights coming directly from the LMS . We commingle that with other data sources that the student generates within our systems , and we get a holistic view of the student . We understand them , and believe we better support them by understanding them through data .”
And although Brightspace plays a large part in National University ’ s digital transformation , the institution has worked with other partners to aid the student experience for both the students themselves and the masses of faculty members that support them through their educational journey .
Baldasare states that , as part of their transformation and merger , teams at National University have had the complex job of re-architecting all student and institutional data behind the scenes . “ We are working on a full scale data modernisation project with the help of Deloitte , and we are also working on some holistic predictive models of student
success with CML Insights . And Qualtrics is our partner on the unstructured data project sentiment analysis .”
“ The work with Qualtrics is beyond fascinating ,” Pendleton adds , also alluding to a new not-ready-to-announce new student information system .
“ The partners are really what makes it happen . We are in the middle of a data explosion where we have figured out that there ’ s gold in those hills , so to speak . Everybody has data , but it ’ s extracting
226 September 2023