Case Studies > Pyramid propels University of Pretoria to even greater student success

Pyramid propels University of Pretoria to even greater student success

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Africa

Country

South Africa

Product

Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform
Blackboard Analytics for Learn
PeopleSoft Student Information System

Tech Stack

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS)
Higher Education Data Analyzer (HEDA)

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Customer Satisfaction
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Industries

Education

Applicable Functions

Quality Assurance
Business Operation

Use Cases

Remote Collaboration

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

The University of Pretoria (UP) is a multi-campus public research university located in South Africa. It is one of Africa’s top universities, teaching over 50,000 students across seven campuses. The university boasts an 83.5 percent pass rate and 93 percent of its graduates are employed within six months of qualifying. UP is committed to improving student success rates and has implemented an evidence-based approach to support its strategic goal of enhancing student access and success. The university uses student data to intervene in a timely manner if a student is underperforming. UP has a strong focus on data-driven strategies and has integrated various data sources to provide a holistic view of student performance and institutional operations.

The Challenge

The University of Pretoria (UP) is a multi-campus public research university in South Africa, teaching over 50,000 students across seven campuses. With an 83.5 percent pass rate and 93 percent of graduates employed within six months of qualifying, UP is one of Africa’s top universities. On a mission to further improve student success rates, the UP was looking to advance its analytics capabilities. “We implemented an evidence-based approach to support our number one strategic goal to improve student access and success, therefore using student data to intervene in time, not after the fact, if a student is underperforming,” explained Dolf Jordaan, Deputy Director of eLearning. “We needed an integrated cloud-based solution data eco-system in our approach to improving student success—you can’t just put words on strategic documents focusing on student success without using data.” Analytics from the Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS), which both students and lecturers use, provided reports on each course and numerous performance course reports to help identify students who were at risk of falling behind. But a more holistic institutional view was needed, one that could pull in other data sources, including an institutional resource of historical data used for national reporting, student surveys, and the PeopleSoft Student Information system that held campus data. When some systems and data sources were migrated to the cloud with Amazon Web Services, there was an opportunity to develop a more sophisticated scalable approach. The goal was to provide Faculty Student Advisors and other key stakeholders with an intelligence platform for digging deeper into descriptive and predictive analytics. As a Blackboard partner, the Pyramid platform was a natural fit for UP in 2013.

The Solution

The Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform combines data preparation, analytics, and data science, which were key areas UP aimed to improve. As the first African higher education institution to implement Blackboard Analytics for Learn, UP was ready to build on its capabilities. Pyramid, being a Blackboard partner, was well-positioned to supplement course analytics from the LMS with a holistic institutional view, drawing on other data sources. Pyramid’s Pulse engine enables UP to pursue a hybrid approach, pulling in data from both cloud and on-premises databases. Data modeling features integrate Blackboard, PeopleSoft, Higher Education Data Analyzer (HEDA), and Student Academic Readiness Surveys (STARS) for granular analysis. Combining historical and real-time data on the Pyramid platform means descriptive insights on grades and course activity are now supplemented with cohort analytics that can be used to identify students at risk. The flexibility to model more data sets was matched by a license that covered 250 active users and allowed for report bursting, where reports not dynamically tied to underlying data can be created, scaled, and made available to stakeholders, including deans, deputy deans, and heads of department. Modeling in Pyramid has been fundamental for helping the executive leadership team, for example, informing the executive leadership through real-time data during the COVID-pandemic, and reporting the university’s teaching and learning performance to national stakeholders.

Operational Impact

The big win for UP is a more holistic overview of students, with deep insights into learning lifecycles based on historical and real-time data that inform institutional change.
The Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform has become the foundation for UP's student success and institutional data-driven strategies.
UP has taken data analytics to another level, allowing users to carry out sophisticated analytics and integrate different data sources to answer their teaching and learning questions.
Features and functionality that stand out include Pyramid’s data modeling tools, its presentation and publication capabilities, the Pulse node for enabling hybrid data collection, and bursting for making reports quickly available.
The platform's ease of use and ability to carry out rudimentary and advanced analytics meet many user needs, significantly improving 'speed to answers' for stakeholders.

Quantitative Benefit