Student engagement and learning analytics offer numerous benefits for higher education providers, helping them to more effectively understand a student’s engagement with their academic course. In our previous blog ‘DIY engagement analytics – is it time to call in the experts?’, we outlined the differences between developing an in-house solution and investing in a comprehensive engagement analytics platform, showing the benefits of StREAM.
When weighing up your options as to whether to develop a DIY analytics solution in-house, or embed a fully developed engagement analytics platform, here’s a breakdown of 7 key things that can be helpful to consider:
1. Cost
Initially, the upfront costs of in-house development may seem lower. However, our decade-long partnership with over 30 institutions has shown that in-house costs quickly escalate and become unpredictable, with no guarantee of success, often leading institutions to switch to a ready-made solution like StREAM.
StREAM offers a fixed-price implementation that includes integrations with common education systems. This means pricing is predictable and can be budgeted for and combined with StREAM’s proven ability to enhance student retention and generate substantial financial savings, it proves a more cost-effective choice over time, as demonstrated in our success stories from Keele University and the University of Essex.
You can give our StREAM ROI calculator a go to explore this more >
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2. Time to value
StREAM is delivered as a cloud-based deployment with prebuilt integrations via Kortext Fusion, ensuring a seamless onboarding experience. Full implementation typically occurs within 6 months, supported by our specialist Professional Services team, which includes project management, technical design, business analysis, development, training, and consultancy.
This means your institution can start benefiting from actionable insights and improved student outcomes much sooner than with an in-house solution that can take significantly longer to develop, test, and deploy, often facing delays and scope creep.
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3. Expertise and resources
In-house solutions require recruiting, hiring, and retaining a range of specialists across a range of disciplines. This includes ongoing maintenance and management, which can strain existing staff and resources, or be impacted by competing projects and priorities – all this with no guarantees!
With StREAM, you’re investing in expertise and resources dedicated to and passionate about using student engagement analytics to support your institutional goals. Our Professional Services team is always on hand to ensure seamless design, configuration, rollout, adoption, as well as comprehensive support and training. Since 2012, Kortext have also built an extensive R&D team that continuously innovates our solutions within StREAM. We also collaborate with industry experts like WONKHE, UKAT, HEPI, and THE to further understand the evolving needs of the sector to develop scalable solutions.
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4. Scalability
StREAM is designed to be and has been delivered at scale across over 30 universities already, with features and capabilities that can grow in-line with your university’s needs. We also offer Professional Consultancy, working with you to help maximise the rollout and adoption of the platform through best practice gathered from our StREAM community.
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5. Risks and reliability
StREAM offers a lower-risk and more reliable solution that has been developed in partnership with the sector. Not only do our API-based integrations minimise data issues, but we adhere to high security standards, including ISO9000, ISO 27001, and Cyber Essentials, ensuring robust data protection. You will also reliably have regular product updates, bug fixes, and continuous support from Kortext.
In-house development faces challenges like bugs, extensive testing, and the risk of not delivering results or having any impact on student outcomes. This avenue depends heavily on the internal team’s ability to maintain and update the system, with potential issues from data problems and staff turnover.
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6. Innovation and features
StREAM offers a range of out-of-the-box features, including a predictive algorithm, engagement risk radar, alerts framework, and end-to-end interventions lifecycle, that will instantly deliver value to your university.
Kortext’s dedicated research and development team continuously innovates StREAM. With over a decade of experience and insights from more than 30 higher education institutions, our solutions adapt to the latest educational trends and technologies, supported by feedback from our customers, and partners. For instance, AI will play a major role in future analytics, and we’re already working on this! This ongoing innovation means we can continue to support you in delivering effective student support, understanding student engagement and improving outcomes.
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7. Integrations
Direct platform integrations can be both challenging and time-consuming resulting in data quality, data reliability, and data lag issues which often cause end user doubt. Some universities also embark on data centralisation and data cleansing projects which cause delays to in-house analytics projects, whilst delivering no value or having any impact on student outcomes.
StREAM’s robust API based integration layer in Kortext Fusion is based on the Microsoft Fabric (AI-powered platform) helping us work together to seamlessly integrate the common educational technologies which are not yet codified for student engagement analytics into StREAM. We can easily identify and troubleshoot any upstream data issues quickly through the Feeds Alert Framework and data is pulled through in near real time (overnight).
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Call on our expertise
By adopting StREAM, you’ll be able to benefit from a quick deployment and time-to-value, you won’t need to invest in the expertise or in-house resources which can increase your time and costs, but you’ll still have access to specialist consultancy and support. Not only will you be able to access the advanced features and innovations without the burden of development and long implementation times, but you’ll also become part of a student engagement analytics community with other institutions who have worked on best practice for delivering and managing interventions and the wider use of the data and student support services.
Take the first steps today
