CFEED is proud to announce the launch of its Gen 2 platform, a significant milestone in our mission to provide cutting-edge data insights and analytics solutions to education institutions across Florida.
This update reflects our ongoing commitment to empowering educators, advisors, and policymakers with the analytics and AI tools they need to identify insights that drive impactful decisions for students. With Gen 2, CFEED solidifies its position as the leading education analytics platform for end-to-end student journey research, offering a faster, smarter, and more user-friendly experience.
Platform Improvements: What’s New in Gen 2
Gen 2’s infrastructure is updated to ensure continued scalability, allowing partner institutions to integrate more data sources, higher data volumes, and support increasingly complex research initiatives. The platform has expanded its capacity to ingest data from a wider range of sources, with standardized data transformations that improve the preparation and integration processes. These updates enhance data transformation efficiency and consistency, positioning the platform to better support evolving partner needs.
Additionally, Gen 2 features updated data structures with improved naming conventions, enabling more intuitive exploration and interpretation. These refinements enhance accessibility for CFEED’s research analysts and its future use of AI CoPilots, supporting more detailed user-driven research efforts with the help of AI.
The four enhanced machine learning models now deliver even more precise predictions of student risk and readiness, empowering institutions with reliable insights to support students more effectively. While the readiness categories—Beginning, Approaching, Expected, and Probable—remain consistent with what partners are familiar with, the distribution of values within these categories has been refined. The refinements provide balanced distributions, ensuring that predictions are meaningful and easier to interpret. Therefore, the results are consistent for partners but also provide a clearer, more practical framework for identifying and addressing student needs across institutions going forward.
Advanced Machine Learning Model Capabilities
A key highlight of the Gen 2 platform is its upgrade to Microsoft’s latest Azure AI | Azure Machine Learning Studio. This transition brings advanced AI and machine learning capabilities, providing improved model customization, parallel processing for faster insights, and an expanded range of functionalities for building, training, and deploying machine learning (ML). These advancements position CFEED to efficiently harness the latest AI-driven innovations, including future integration with CoPilot technologies.
This upgrade allows CFEED to conduct new and repeatable ML experiments more efficiently, enabling a quick evaluation of statistical and ML models to determine the best accuracy and precision for specific datasets. The capability to perform automated ML model selection—where multiple models analyze the same dataset—has been vastly improved, reducing processing time and improving predictive accuracy. CFEED is positioned for a future where AI CoPilots will take this process further by automating data acquisition, model selection, and even the visualization of predicted results.
For the current iteration, the ML model selection process identified the Decision Forest model as the optimal model choice. The Decision Forest provided superior prediction accuracy, with improvements such as a 20.9% increase in matriculation accuracy (from 61.8% to 82.7%), a 7.7% improvement in momentum prediction accuracy (from 67.3% to 75.0%), and a 6.4% gain in transfer shock true positive predictions (from 53.6% to 60.0%). The Decision Forest model was rigorously trained using diverse datasets, ensuring its reliability for analyzing CFEED’s Momentum, Matriculation, and Transfer Shock models.
By adopting Azure’s cutting-edge capabilities, Gen 2 offers institutions a more powerful and efficient platform for making informed, data-driven decisions that directly support student success.
User Experience Enhancements
Gen 2 introduces significant upgrades to the user experience, ensuring seamless access and analysis of data. A new unified endpoint provides a gateway to data access for all users, enhancing data exploration capabilities and boosting research efficiency.
Interactive dashboards are also being developed to provide actionable insights, with three new dashboards in progress, including one set to launch in the first half of 2025 as part of the Smart Start Program. These dashboards will enable school administrators, program coordinators, and student success teams to monitor student participation and performance, equipping them to better identify students for programs and track progress effectively.
Impact on Students and Institutional Outcomes
The improvements in Gen 2 directly enhance CFEED’s ability to support students and measure program outcomes. The platform’s refined student record-matching process, which creates a longitudinal view of each student’s journey, connecting a student’s data across institutions even in complex scenarios such as name changes, withdrawals, or enrollment in adjacent districts. This comprehensive tracking system enhances the precision in program measurement by connecting student outcomes to specific interventions, helping institutions identify the most effective strategies for success.
CFEED’s enhanced matching capabilities now stand to deliver even greater benefits with Gen 2’s advanced infrastructure. These improvements ensure that more students are included in key programs, even if they temporarily leave the region, allowing for a holistic view of their academic journeys across Central Florida. With its improved infrastructure, Gen 2 ensures resources are directed to the areas of greatest impact, minimizing waste and enabling partner institutions to achieve measurable improvements in student success.
Looking Ahead: What’s Next with CFEED’s Gen 2 Upgrade
Gen 2 lays the groundwork for even greater innovation and impact. Its scalable infrastructure is built to integrate more data sources, handle higher data volumes, and support more research initiatives in greater detail across the student journey. As the platform continues to evolve, CFEED will continue to leverage Microsoft’s Data & AI tools to expand features, refine data integrations, and develop new machine learning capabilities. These advancements will provide institutions with deeper and more nuanced insights, enhancing their ability to support students effectively.
For example, the Gen 2 roadmap also includes the integration of early student grades and assessment data, further expanding the width and depth of student journey analytics. Together, these updates mark a significant step toward making data more accessible and actionable, supporting both strategic planning and day-to-day decision-making.
Conclusion
Gen 2 marks a transformative chapter in CFEED’s journey, representing a faster, smarter, and more user-friendly platform that drives actionable insights for educational institutions. By integrating AI in education technologies, alongside enhanced infrastructure, advanced analytics, and improved user experience, CFEED remains at the forefront of end-to-end student journey research across Florida.
As CFEED continues to innovate with Gen 2, we look forward to partnering with institutions dedicated to advancing student success. By leveraging these resources, your institution can gain valuable insights and create impactful programs for your students. Explore how CFEED can help you achieve measurable improvements in education outcomes—let’s build a brighter future together.
Learn More & Connect
To see how CFEED’s initiatives can benefit your institution or to get involved, visit CFEED’s Homepage and follow us on LinkedIn for updates and discussions about enhancing student success across Central Florida. For more information, please contact Diana Pienaar, CFEED Director at Valencia College, via email at dpienaar@valenciacollege.edu.
About CFEED
Central Florida Education Ecosystem Database (CFEED) is a partnership, comprised of the Helios Education Foundation, the School District of Osceola County (SDOC), Orange County Public Schools (OCPS), Valencia College (Valencia), and the University of Central Florida (UCF), along with Midtown Consulting Group, that is engaged in a collaborative program to develop insights and create impacts for students in Central Florida.
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