Retention is a popular subject for those of us involved in BI and DW these days.  There is barely a week that goes by without someone asking for some retention statistics or wanting to know what we can bring to the process.

I’m interested in claims reported on the BBC website that Gloucester College is seeing “significant improvement” in retention through the use of facebook.  As you may know, UNE has been an active advocate of Facebook for some time, a fact I proudly reported earlier this year and strategies such as these are very useful for UNE where such a high number of our students are based off-campus.  But I’m not sure how any of these various strategies can be directly associated with a change in retention.

While we all wish that the features of Facebook would just naturally appear in a Virtual Learning Environment or an online portal of some kind that students interact with, the painful truth is that they don’t, and even if they did students wouldn’t use them.  They like Facebook and they’re on that platform anyway so it would appear that Gloucester College and City of Sunderland College are finding ways to go with the tide rather than against it.

The problem of seeing who is using these systems, for how long, when and for what is something I feel is necessary before we can start claiming that they are having a direct affect on issues such as retention.  Maybe these UK colleges have found a way to tap into useage stats or perhaps they’ve built their own applications that include transaction logging which they can track back to some kind of student ID.  Maybe I’ll see if I can find out…