London South Bank University is working with multinational technology and consulting company IBM across a range of initiatives which will benefit students. The partnership gives our students a deeper knowledge of the software created by the market-leading blue chip company with access to their state-of-the-art technology and professional expertise.
“Working with IBM gives our students a real advantage.”
Professor Phil Cardew, Pro Vice Chancellor for Students and Education explains:
“Working with IBM gives our students a real advantage. Through this partnership we will be able to further extend and enrich our teaching through access to state-of-art technologies; to case studies, technology-based white papers and other teaching materials.
“This means our students get exposure to ‘cutting-edge’ thinking and practices from the world of business and technology, giving them a real world knowledge coupled with an enterprising mind-set which prepares them well for the future.”
“This partnership will deepen the academic relationship between our organisations; the ultimate beneficiary of this being our students, who will not only have access to academic content but also the opportunity to undertake internships with IBM to gain valuable hands-on experience.”
LSBU and IBM working together to improve learning outcomes
One example of the LSBU – IBM partnership is the joint project using predictive analytics to enhance the University’s student support programmes.
“This university-business collaboration is supporting a better and more individualized learning experience”
Implementation of predictive analytics, currently in the early stages of piloting, will allow the University to maintain a targeted approach to monitoring student engagement and the delivery of support to individual students. It will, when fully developed, also enable focused engagement with particular groups of students – categorized not only through academic and demographic data, but also via their current, and prior, activity within the University.
The process begins by providing an analysis of student activity over a period of 2-3 years (in the past) looking at the final results achieved by students (in terms of their progression or achievement within their course of study) mapped against a range of criteria: demographic information, entry qualifications, attendance, assessment, and transition through the course.
This data is then mapped against the ‘known characteristics’ of new and progressing students in the coming academic year, providing an initial ‘risk rating’ for students on starting the year (based on their likelihood to become disengaged – as informed by past experience , either of the students themselves or of their peers in past years).
The data (which can be sorted by course, module, or a range of other criteria – such as those who entered through clearing, those who missed orientation or those in receipt of a bursary) are then further informed by student activity, which, in its turn, raises, or lowers, the risk rating. Thus a ‘high risk’ student may engage well and become less in need of support.
This university-business collaboration is supporting a better and more individualized learning experience across core material and extra-curricular activity for our students.
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Related pages:
IBM (external site)
Growing Experience: A Review of Undergraduate Placements in Computer Science
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