Academic Success Monitor (ASM)

Empowering student self-management and streamlining support

The Academic Success Monitor (ASM) at UNSW identifies students at risk of falling off-track in their course earlier in the teaching period through machine learning analysis, providing personalised AI-driven insights and support suggestions. The aim of the ASM is to help students feel empowered to achieve their academic goals through friendly suggestions for support and encouraging nudges from the ASM if they seem to be falling behind. It also connects them with the wealth of support services available at UNSW to get the right help early enough to make a difference. Encouraging students to self-manage provides support to academic staff, reduces failure rates, improves retention, and eases administrative workloads.

Unifying UNSW’s educational data

The ASM integrates multiple student data sources into a secure data lake, using machine learning to predict academic risks based on how students have been engaging with course content and activities. Personalised AI-driven messages suggest support options, while academics and support teams are alerted to the possible need for intervention. Following a successful pilot, the project is now incorporating legal, IT, and privacy improvements.

Watch the video to hear how this vision has been developing.

Learn how the project originated

How we know it is working

During our pilot phases, the predictive machine learning model at UNSW correctly identified 79% of student failures by the end of term, with a weekly prediction accuracy of 61%. In the 2023 term 3 test, 81% of failures were flagged early, and during the 2024 pilot, 75% of academics agreed students were identified earlier, saving an average of 1.3 hours weekly in tracking engagement. AI messages sent to at-risk students boosted engagement by 20%.

With plans to scale across all of UNSW, the Academic Success Monitor aims to improve the student experience, increase chances for academic success and ensure that our students, teachers and support staff are connected just in time.

External recognition of the vision behind the project

The Academic Success Monitor has been selected by international consulting firm Gartner as a winner of the 2024 Gartner Eye on Innovation Awards for Education, an award that recognises innovative use of technology to drive best-in-class initiatives. In addition to its recognition by Gartner, the ASM project has also been recognised by Microsoft, which invited the project team to present at their  Higher Education summit in October 2024, and UNESCO-IITE, which has expressed interest in doing a case study on the project as part of research into using advanced digital technologies and AI to enable community-based learning programs.

Thoughts from our industry partner

The partner team at Microsoft captured the project in a case study.

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