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LSBU to invest $23 mn in IBM's Exceptional Student Experience

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Sharath Kumar
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LONDON, UK: IBM today announced that London South Bank University (LSBU) will invest more than $23 million in IBM's Exceptional Student Experience, which uses a mix of analytics, mobile, social and security solutions built on cloud infrastructure to monitor academic progress of individual students.

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Ensuring each student who enrolls on a higher education course has the support they need to graduate and secure employment is fundamental to every university's mission, and therefore LSBU has invested in the five year platform which will augment students' learning experience and help the institution achieve its digital transformation goals.

Exceptional Student Experience from IBM aims to transform universities and colleges to be truly student centric. This can be achieved by delivering a personalized engagement from the application process, throughout their student life, to graduation and beyond."The key benefit of this change program is that it will enable LSBU to identify students who require support to complete their studies, and underpin our platform to enable repeatable, predictable, reliable and scalable technology-enabled learning for our students at best value-for-money," said Phil Cardew, Pro Vice Chancellor at LSBU.

Since the introduction of tuition fees, students expect value from their investment and learning that takes advantage, of the most up-to-date technologies. LSBU's investment in IBM's Exceptional Student Experience will lead to up-to-date collaboration, a greater diversity of provision and more variety in modes of learning including mobile access to applications, social communities for knowledge sharing, online profiling, and dynamic learning environments. Combined, this can improve teaching, assessment, feedback and student preparation for the world of work.

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To support the introduction of the program, LSBU's entire IT environment will move to SoftLayer, an IBM company cloud computing platform. Adopting a cloud strategy will greatly increase the university's agility, enabling educators and administrators to offer new services to students at busy times at a much faster rate. LSBU will now have the ability to manage the ever-changing performance demands of today's digitally connected students throughout the academic year. In addition, by moving the infrastructure online the space taken by the original data centers will now be transformed into additional teaching space.

IBM will deliver the Exceptional Student Experience solution via the Softlayer platform, which will align with predictive analytics for student retention and social collaboration for richer curriculum delivery, all accessed through a personalized portal offering any-where, any-time, any-device access to on-demand learning. The IBM solution will allow LSBU to be interconnected and intelligent when monitoring its students' academic progress, creating a holistic overview for every single student's personalized learning experience.

Through predictive analytics, Exceptional Student Experience will enable LSBU to identify students who may require additional support with their studies, and will enable them to intervene with those students to offer any help that may be needed.