How Becker College drives educational development with Microsoft
Located in central Massachusetts, Becker College serves approximately 1,800 students, 600 of which are enrolled in the interactive media and game design program – one of the largest and #4 ranked in the world. Recently, students from the program developed a mobile game that had 3,000 downloads in the first ten minutes of its launch. To achieve this caliber of success, it takes an innovative approach to education development.
As one of the world’s top schools for interactive media and game design, Becker College’s mission is “to provide transformative learning experiences in a socially responsible, inclusive community—anchored by its Core Values, which promotes academic excellence, inspires innovation and entrepreneurship, fosters an agile mindset, and prepares graduates to contribute to a global society that is increasingly focused on change.”[1] While small, Becker College is grounded in bold ideas and strives for academic excellence with its commitment to the Agile Mindset curriculum and educational development, which includes: Empathy, Divergent Thinking, Social and Emotional Intelligence, and an Entrepreneurial Outlook.
“I think what draws students to Becker College is that we’re a small school that can impact students in a large way,” says Alan Ritacco, Dean of the School of Design and Technology.
Regardless of major, each program at Becker College is backed by four key pillars: empathy, social and emotional intelligence, divergent thinking, and entrepreneurial outlook. This forward-thinking approach is integrated into each component of every student’s coursework. Each and every incoming student is required to take core classes focusing on the agile mindset as part of their degree plan, and they learn to integrate these core values into the work they produce. For instance, Ritacco explains, “If you used no empathy to create a game… it’s not marketable, no one wants to play it.”
This forward-thinking approach to an agile curriculum involves encouraging educators to drive experiential learning with informational and instructional workshops, meetings, and conversations to keep communication and feedback open. By taking this approach to educational development, Becker College puts value on experiential learning and allows students to develop their own goals and ethics in a supportive, educational environment.
Leveraging Office 365 and LiveTiles to enhance student engagement
Becker College has always been committed to engaging its students through a forward-thinking approach to education. As a way to stay firm in this commitment, the College began looking for a digital solution that would empower faculty and give them greater ability to enhance learning opportunities and educational development for students. To do so, they partnered with Microsoft and LiveTiles – a tech company that provides an all-in-one solution to drive organization-wide collaboration – to develop a centralized digital resource for students to access information.
Using Office 365, Becker College built a LiveTiles platform to launch a pilot program for non-traditional students, such as adult learners. After achieving great success, they began rolling out the platform for both traditional and non-traditional students to give them a one-stop information shop. The platform now provides easy access to homework, email, athletic and sports announcements, student activity updates, and more. This, along with customized learning modules and dashboards, allows students and faculty to interact with each other with greater efficiency to provide enhanced learning experiences. This kind of connectivity offers students the ability to take ownership of their educational experience by developing goals within their own educational environment.
On the faculty and administrative side of things, professors are leveraging SharePoint as a tool to receive department updates, stay in communication with students, and receive important news from leadership.
“The faculty really likes it because of the built-in SharePoint. I can click on it and it keeps me within the portal and it’s all tied in to one place. Faculty members really like having that share-ability without having to look through emails and things. The SharePoint feature really has been the biggest success for faculty in my mind,” says Ritacco.
With the LiveTiles platform, the College now has the ability deliver a sleek portal to faculty and students on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices to support a modern, tech-savvy population. Additionally, they are leveraging discourse analytics with Azure machine learning technology to develop data-based engagement profiles on each student. The platform uses a psychometric survey coupled with social data and sociological trends to give students predictive analytics and help design personalize learning perspectives.
Through innovative technology, Becker College is enhancing its forward-thinking, agile approach to education and designing flexible curriculum to fill gaps in students’ needs. The College has a keen understanding that no two students are exactly alike. Each and every student has different needs and require a personalized approach. With these new technological capabilities in place, educators are enabled to develop personalized learning pathways designed to maximize the effectiveness of student engagement.
Preparing students for the future
With 54% of newly hired college graduates staying with their company for less than two years, and 25% of workers having held five different jobs by the age of 35, Ritacco hopes to give the students at Becker College the ability to be lifelong learners. He says, “We’re not preparing you for your first job, we’re preparing you for every job, including your last job and last career.
With lifelong learning in mind, Ritacco is now designing a new program at Becker called Agile University. The program will leverage their existing Microsoft technology partnership to target non-traditional students who are technically oriented to develop skillsets to help fill the 1.4 million IT jobs that will be available by 2020. The plan is to leverage Azure machine learning and Microsoft AI to enhance educational development by creating student profiles to place participants based on aptitude, fit, and acumen.
Agile University will support Becker’s agile curriculum approach by giving faculty the support they need to continue to apply and integrate Microsoft technology to enhance the university’s program. Looking to the future, it’s clear that Becker College is on to something with preparing its students to have sustainable careers backed by the valuable learning and education acquired there.
[1] https://www.becker.edu/about/vision-mission
