Erasmus School of Law – Student Journey

To begin with, Erasmus University (EUR), a research university based in Rotterdam with an international student body. This is their second process mining project with Apolix.

To summarize, in our previous project, we focused on the student application process to attract international top talent to the EUR. Thus drawing upon the success of this data driven approach, we are extremely proud to announce we expanded process mining to the student journey for the renowned Erasmus School of Law.  Erasmus School of Law offers both undergraduate, graduate and PhD education in law and criminology.

In short, Erasmus School of Law aims to offer a world class learning experience to its students that is both challenging and inspiring. It is Erasmus School of Law’s ambition to continuously improve its programmes and its student services so that they seamlessly fit the students’ needs. As a pioneer in data driven decision making, Erasmus School of Law decided to use process mining to enhance their insight in the student journey of their students.

“Process mining provides us with valuable insight in potential bottlenecks in the student journey and helps us identify possible solutions to make the learning experience even more meaningful to our students”

– Erasmus School of Law’s vice dean of education of bachelor programmes, Full Professor Harriet Schelhaas.

Understanding the Student Journey

Generally, the first step in every process mining project, is we start understanding the processes and the underlying data. The student journey of Erasmus School of Law students is currently being managed through two separate IT systems: one for course registrations and one for exam results. Therefore, the first step is to combine the data from these two systems.

Following, we visualized the entire student journey from registration until graduation. Altogether, both the start and end of every course, programme and year were visualized.

The visualisation of the student journey. (anonymised, randomized, simplified for visualisation purposes)

Student Performance

Moreover, to take our understanding of the student journey a step further, we added information about student’s performance into our model. Thus based on this data, courses are analyzed by grades and the number of times students need to pass a course. As a result, Erasmus School of Law was able to identify which courses are most challenging to students. Consequently, this meant such that proper measures could be taken to limit unnecessary delay for students.

To clarify, individual student experiences are paramount for Erasmus School of Law. Therefore, it is important to be able to cater to individual wishes of students. Additionally, continuous improvement of the program at the end of each year based on fresh insights helps Erasmus School of Law to achieve its goal to offer meaningful education. An important method for Erasmus School of Law is to find indicators for performance and to understand which parameters predict the length of the student journey. Process mining helps ESL to identify these parameters.  “This enables Erasmus School of Law to pinpoint the important moments in a student’s learning experience during which it is important to provide extra study aid to the student to help them graduate on time”, adds Professor Harriet Schelhaas.

Executive Dashboard of most important findings (Figures randomized for anonymity)

Continuous Improvement

Process mining helps Erasmus School of Law to help students that are currently held back in their studies. The student counselors can now precisely check what paths the students have taken, and which courses students find most difficult. Consequently, it becomes possible to provide tailor-made study advice to help students graduate and to intervene exactly at the right moment to prevent unnecessary delay in every single student journey.

Future Steps

This project proves the added value process mining offers for Higher Education Institutes. By analyzing a student journey, process mining provides you with deep insight into your programmes and gives several opportunities to improve student experience and help students graduate on time. We are excited to support the Erasmus School of Law of Erasmus University to use the dashboards each academic year to improve their students’ experience and affect the bottom line.

The monitoring dashboard (Student numbers anonymized and figures randomized for anonymity)