UMass Global is a fully online university serving 19,000 students, 97% of them working adults with an average age of 35. Chancellor Dr. David Andrews on proactive AI, rubrics over grading, and why education should be easier.
“I'm not a pilot person. I think that you can spend as much time in a pilot than you can working at scale. So why not work at scale? True. Right? Because you're gonna bring in the same human capital and you've got the technology capital. And today, with machine learning and AI and technology platforms, if you're trying to do something for 100 students, why wouldn't you go at 1,000? And for us, it's 100,000.”
“Here are leads who hadn't decided to enroll, and they're aged leads. We haven't reached out to them in a month. Let's just test. What would it look like if we start using that technology to reach out to them and have those AI agents connect back with our admissions reps and do soft handovers for those leads?” And it allowed us to reduce the cost of proactively reaching out and connecting with learners by more than 70%. And we saw a 30X ROI on the investment because of using the technology.