eCollege Program Intelligence Manager Enables Data-Driven Decision Making
DENVER – October 19, 2004 – The eLearning Division of eCollege® [Nasdaq: ECLG], a leading provider of value-added information services to the post-secondary education market, today announced plans to launch its Program Intelligence Manager, a set of business intelligence tools enabling institutions to easily identify, capture, analyze and act on key program metrics. Scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2005, Program Intelligence Manager v1.0 enables data-driven decision making to assist in more successful student outcomes and better institutional performance.
“Program Intelligence Manager is aimed at giving institutions more tools to drive top and bottom line growth and regulatory compliance through valuable insight into program performance,†said Oakleigh Thorne, chairman and CEO of eCollege. “It will help identify ways to improve program quality, increase student retention, reduce the cost of retaining accreditation and assist in justifying Title IV funding.â€
Because of the type and amount of data hosted as part of eCollege’s outsource solution, Program Intelligence Manager is uniquely positioned to store, track and benchmark behavioral data from within and across online courses and programs. Program Intelligence Manager goes beyond any reporting capabilities available in the eLearning industry today by facilitating data analysis, in an integrated fashion, all the way back to the beginning of an institution’s online program.
Gain Valuable Insight into Program Performance
Institutions don’t always know why one of their online programs, or courses within their programs, might be more successful than others, or even how their programs compare with other institutions. Program Intelligence Manager enables institutions to get answers to hundreds of analytical questions to determine areas for improvement. They also can compare their results with anonymous data from other programs of similar size and with similar resources that have agreed to participate in benchmarking. This enables institutions to develop best practices and set performance goals to ensure program success.
Increase Student Retention
Tracking student retention is only part of the equation. Institutions need a better way to understand at-risk behavior, especially during the critical drop/add period, so that more students can be retained through the completion of a course or program. Program Intelligence Manager enables institutions to gain insight into the factors that drive retention, and identify student behavior to help predict retention. Institutions can identify the variables that most affect successful student outcomes, such as the frequency of use of a particular course feature or amount of instructor activity. By identifying these variables, and analyzing historical data, institutions can better understand key metrics and make more informed decisions around areas that need improvement.
Reduce the Cost of Retaining Accreditation
Accreditation processes can be cumbersome and costly. Program Intelligence Manager provides multiple years of easily accessible data analysis, which can otherwise be time consuming to gather. This enables institutions to create and execute historical queries quickly to provide the necessary information that accrediting bodies require institutions to provide.
Retain and Justify Title IV Funding
Justifying seat time in an online environment can be challenging to an institution. Program Intelligence Manager enables institutions to report on the time a student spends in an online course down to the minute, across multiple programs and even multiple campuses, facilitating comparison from one course to another or one term to another. This assists institutions in providing accurate student tracking information to the regulatory body to help justify Title IV funding, which supports long-term program growth.
Program Intelligence Manager combines business intelligence tools and an extensible data warehouse architecture to help institutions analyze and understand the meaning of current and historical data. By providing a standard set of queries that can be customized and a standard set of key metrics that can be used to measure program performance or compare with other programs, Program Intelligence Manager v1.0 will enable analysis in the areas of user activity, retention and enrollment.
Program Intelligence Manager is part of eCollege’s product advancement roadmap, which is driven by a focus on program growth, operating efficiencies and program reporting. Along with the eCollege Content Manager and the enhanced Program Administration System, these new advances are designed to help customers grow profitably and facilitate regulatory compliance.
About eCollege
eCollege [Nasdaq: ECLG] is a leading provider of value-added information services to the post-secondary and K-12 education markets. The Company’s eLearning Division designs, builds and supports some of the most successful, fully online degree, certificate/diploma and professional development programs in the country. The Company’s Enrollment Division, Datamark, Inc., helps institutions build new enrollments and increase student retention. Customers include publicly traded for-profit institutions, community colleges, public and private universities, school districts, and state departments of education. eCollege was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Denver. Datamark was founded in 1987 and is headquartered in Salt Lake City. For more information, visit www.eCollege.com and www.Datamark.com.
This news release contains statements that are not historical in nature and that may be characterized as “forward-looking statements†within the meaning of the securities laws, including statements regarding: functionality of developments; adequacy of developments to support customer requirements; expected cost savings to customers; the delivery and management by our project partners of a computing infrastructure; our ability to leverage technologies; the timeline of implementation of projects; and any other statements that are not historical facts. You can identify such statements when you see words such as “will,†expect,†“plan,†“believe†and similar expressions. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks. Actual results may differ materially. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from estimates or projections contained in the forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to: competition in the highly competitive online learning market; the possibility of failures of our network infrastructure and computer systems; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; the impact of laws and regulations affecting education and the Internet; the timing of our sales cycle may cause variable operating results; the cost of marketing activities; our dependence on key personnel; and such other factors as are discussed in our most recent Form 10-Q/A Quarterly Report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which report you are encouraged to review in connection with this release. We believe that these forward-looking statements are reasonable; however, you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations and speak only as of the date of this release. We are not obligated to publicly release any revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events after the date of this release.
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