New software partnership will support student success initiatives

APRIL 21, 2020 — UTSA has partnered with Austin-based ed-tech firm Civitas Learning to offer a suite of intelligence-based software solutions to expand UTSA’s student success initiatives.

“UTSA has made tremendous progress in moving the needle on our student success metrics over the last several years. Our focus now is on using data-informed decision making to accelerate that progress,” said Kimberly Andrews Espy, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “Civitas tools leverage the power of data science and predictive analytics to guide decision making, so this is an ideal partnership for UTSA to build on its strengths of supporting student success.”

One of Civitas’ tools that will be used broadly by key staff and administrators is Inspire, a holistic advising support platform. Inspire is not just for academic advisers. It is built to allow many different users across the institution to support students and coordinate care. Inspire will replace EAB Navigate as the university’s student success software, effective May 1.

“Inspire is a robust, intuitive tool that will greatly enhance collaboration among all those at the university who are involved in student success, which will in turn enable us to better engage with and provide targeted support to students,” said Tammy Wyatt, vice provost for student success.

Academic advisers already have been trained and recently started using the Inspire tool, said Wyatt. The software also will be available to associate deans and others in the colleges who support student success efforts as well as the Tomás Rivera Center, Student Engagement and Belonging, Strategic Enrollment, Athletics and Career-Engaged Learning.

Beginning next week UTSA and Civitas will offer workshops to introduce deans, associate deans and student success center directors to the software’s underlying data science. These workshops will provide a more in-depth explanation of how Civitas uses UTSA data to create predictive models and surface insights from those models to identify and prioritize student success opportunities.

In addition to Inspire, the Civitas products being adopted at UTSA include Illume and Impact. Illume provides insights into the spectrum of risk that exists at UTSA, which in turn allows the university to craft, send and track personalized and timely student success campaigns and messages. Impact is a data analysis tool that will help the university evaluate the efficacy of programs and initiatives, thus refining student success strategies in real time for greater outcomes.