Keynote Address: Dr. John P. Campbell

Keynote Description

The challenges facing higher education in the United States and abroad are wide ranging with varying degrees of urgency. In many cases, the use of academic analytics to address some of these challenges is being considered ­ but generally on a small, highly-localized scale that makes them difficult to justify. The long-term use of analytics requires ideas for collaboration, development, implementation, scaling, and sharing among institutions. John will explore the opportunity for analytics to pull together a team of faculty, staff, and administrators on challenges to develop big ideas to be put into practice ­ real solutions to real problems. This session will particularly focus on the area of student success and the Signals projects. The Signals project is an early warning system that combines real-time data on course performance with data from Blackboard,providing an accurate view of student performance at any point in time. Signals has been integrated into nearly 100 courses and has impacted over 23,000 students. Research indicates that students taking courses that utilize Signals have significantly higher rates of retention than their peers who were in courses not using the system.

About Dr. Campbell

Dr. John P. Campbell is Associate Provost for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at West Virginia University. In this role, John is responsible for providing institution-wide leadership to the University¹s technology infrastructure. John¹s efforts focus on leading the institution¹s strategic and resource planning as well as service delivery. Prior to his appointment at WVU, he was the Associate Vice President for Academic Technologies at Purdue University. His responsibilities focused on the support, empowerment,and enhancement of faculty efforts in research and teaching/learning. During the past ten years, John has examined methods to use academic analytics to identify students at risk within courses. He was the founder of the Signal sproject which has been featured on NBC and in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Signals project has also been awarded the 2012 Noel-Levitz Retention Award, the 2011 Digital Educational Achievement Award, and the 2011 Campus Technology Innovators Award for Teaching and Learning.