Like many of you, we’re busy attending the annual circuit of higher education conferences. While these events cover many topics, we detected a common focus from both vendors and institutions: how do institutions and their technology support students navigating higher education?

At first glance, the focus on student interaction with campus EdTech may seem to be simply about the “conventional” student lifecycle.We believe, however, that EdTech at its best should accommodate diverse and fluid paths. New technologies should support each student’s journey and educational journeys are naturally shaped by background, preparedness, and many other factors. Instead of a one-way street, technology should embrace a full atlas of different roads, turns, and intersections students may travel along the way.

We were struck by a question: If you’re an institution focused on student journeys, what challenges would you face in aligning your technology to support those students? Two answers came to mind:

• Ensure Student Engagement. Engagement is central to a student’s success, and institutions should seek out the best technologies that support that engagement. When one considers the different starting points and paths students take through their higher education experience, ensuring engagement becomes more complicated. EdTech should be able to accommodate these complications through frequent student interaction.
• Leverage Existing Ecosystems. Technology ecosystems designed to support the student journey must take into account the fact that students “touch” different technologies at different times. Institutions must ensure that their tech ecosystems have the flexibility to add applications as needed and provide students with easy and secure access to disparate technologies. These systems should also analyze aggregate data sourced from different applications.

Over the past few months our research has uncovered five products that offer great promise in responding to these two challenges.

Ensure Student Engagement

Kira Talent
We recently spoke with Scott Harrington, Director of Product & Marketing at Kira Talent. Founded in 2012, Kira, which we covered last year, provides an admissions solution that uses non-cognitive assessments to gain a more rounded view of candidates. Kira is developing a solution that supports student engagement at its core. By leveraging assessment data, Kira provides insight into the non-cognitive strengths (e.g. leadership, empathy, and creativity) of admitted students. This information can help institutions understand how best to engage from the admissions process and throughout the educational journey. We will keep a close eye on where Kira takes their student engagement focus.

Campus Labs
Begun as StudentVoice in 2001, Campus Labs is a platform that consolidates data from multiple sources to improve institutional understanding of key aspects of the student experience. Earlier this month we spoke with J.D. White, Vice President of Product Management at Campus Labs, about their student engagement product, “Engage.” Engage allows students to establish, track, and communicate individual pathways, called “co-curricular paths,” towards goals such as leadership or skill development. We look forward to learning more about how Campus Labs plans to develop this product.

Wisr
Founded in 2016, Wisr has had significant adoption in the alumni relations, advancement, and career services spaces. It is a cloud-based platform which helps students and alumni create and manage a digital community of advisors. In our conversations with Wisr CEO and co-founder, Kate Volzer, she emphasized Wisr as an engagement platform that helps to “connect the dots” within a community. Through Wisr, alumni, students, and advisors come together to help understand pathways to career advancement. We look forward to seeing more of Wisr’s product in upcoming demos and conversations.

Read the full story at Eduventures.