In The News

Civitas Learning founder and CEO Charles Thornburgh is shifting his role to chief strategy and innovation officer, and the company is adding Chris Hester as its new CEO. Hester was previously president of WellSky, and he had been CEO of Kinnser Software for about 15 years.

The end of the school year is a time to reflect on accomplishments and — ideally — to abandon regrets, or at least learn from them.

Last September, professors from institutions around the country shared with “Inside Digital Learning” their plans for new classroom initiatives and made some predictions about what they might accomplish. We came back to them recently to ask how they went. A few said they’re too busy with an end-of-year crush of grading to reply. Here’s what the rest of them reported back.

We believe that every student admitted to the University of South Florida will succeed.  The student success movement at USF is built on that simple, fundamental belief.  We hold ourselves accountable for our performance, so we have responded well to the new accountability rules and expectations of improved student outcomes.

For decades, colleges and universities have focused on access as the primary means of fulfilling higher education’s promise to change students’ lives.

The University of South Florida, where I work as the vice president for student success, was no different. But nearly 10 years ago, we began to turn our attention to outcomes. While ensuring more students have access to a college education was an important goal, we knew that access was not enough. We had to provide more students with access to success.

The new chief executive takes over for founder Charles Thornburgh, who had been CEO since launching the company in 2011.

Civitas Learning announced the appointment of Chris Hester as the company’s chief executive officer today. He joins a deeply experienced leadership team and adds more than twenty years of success in the development of software and tools that enable healthcare professionals to apply data-driven insights to practices that improve patient outcomes, at scale.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) today released the results of an ambitious effort to quantify the impact of student success initiatives, in collaboration with Civitas Learning. Designed to determine what works, and target resources at the most effective programs, the UMKC-Civitas Learning partnership was focused on identifying the best strategies to boost persistence among historically underrepresented minority students.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) today released the results of an ambitious effort to quantify the impact of student success initiatives, in collaboration with Civitas Learning. Designed to determine what works, and target resources at the most effective programs, the UMKC-Civitas Learning partnership was focused on identifying the best strategies to boost persistence among historically underrepresented minority students. According to data released today, the institution’s supplemental instruction program (which utilizes tailored group-study in lieu of remedial education) boosts student persistence by 7.8 percentage points.

Rachel Benavides is getting a look behind the community college curtain. What she sees is an industry going through tectonic change.

“In the past, community colleges have been more enrollment-based than outcome-based,” said Benavides, director of Del Mar College’s adult education and literacy program and a member of its inaugural Next Generation Leadership Academy (NGLA). “Now, instead of looking at the front end, we’re looking at the back end and what we as a college have to do to help students get to completion. This is all fresh and new to me.”

Institutions of higher education are facing greater challenges today than ever before. Administrators are grappling with increasing accountability measures, tenuous public support, and the emergent expectations of a diverse student population. At the same time, higher education leaders are also now able to tackle these challenges differently, through access to more abundant data and new tools aimed at improving student success.