Sol Plaatje University

Sol Plaatje University Monitors Student Engagement & Automated Government Reporting for Senate Committee Transparency

Founded in 2014, Sol Plaatje University is one of two universities created during South Africa’s democratic era and is critically engaged in learning, research, and development while enhancing democratic practice and social justice in society. Sol Plaatje University has established itself as a scientific center for data and analytics and as a seat for humanities that stands out in the fields of heritage, anthropology, archaeology, and African languages.

Also an emerging hub for management sciences and entrepreneurship, Sol Plaatje offers undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in Economic & Management Sciences, Education, Humanities, and Natural & Applied Sciences.

Sol's Challenge

In 2018, the university was confronted with an analytics task that took weeks to perform manually. During those weeks, Lorraine de Haast, a Senior e-Learning Systems Administrator at Sol Plaatje University, resolved to find a better way to maximize the utility of the data in the University’s LMS and did some digging online when she found IntelliBoard.

​​Sol Plaatje University has been using IntelliBoard with their Moodle learning management system (LMS) since 2018, when de Haast was confronted with the analytics task. When the University pivoted to remote learning in 2020, IntelliBoard went from helpful to critical.

The university wanted to see which students weren’t engaging with Moodle and the content within their modules. They also wanted lecturers to be able to see who was in danger within their courses.

Building a Successful Learning Solution

During the pandemic, de Haast and her team began using IntelliBoard to track which students were attending class and who might be in need of support. While a weekly user access analytics report to check how many students logged into the LMS became a mainstay, de Haast and her team also began delving further into IntelliBoard capabilities.

Currently, Sol Plaatje University mostly utilizes IntelliBoard reports at the institutional level; de Haast and her team have made increasing use of the learner and instructor dashboards part of their strategic plan for the near future.

Delivering Impact

IntelliBoard became a crucial tool for Sol University to be able to see which students weren’t actively engaging with content, and faculty received reports about who was at risk within their courses.

Additionally, more in-depth reports were given to the Centre for Teaching and Learning, which reports to the Senate Committee on the engagement between the lectures and the students.