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Introducing Lighthouse Data Access Project: Shining the Light on Student Success
Welcome to the new Lighthouse Data Access Project Blog! The Lighthouse Team created this blog to keep all employees up to date with the progress on our newest infrastructure project.
We’ll use it to help you see how the project will be useful to you in your work advancing student success, deliver timely updates on the project’s development, provide professional development opportunities related to data literacy and data governance, and share ways you can be involved.
What the Project Will Do
Here’s a little background on the Lighthouse Data Access project.
Durham Tech is one of four community colleges selected nationally to participate in the Digital Holistic Student Supports infrastructure project. Durham Tech is partnering with Achieving the Dream (ATD) and technology developers DataKind to codesign and implement a Unified Digital Transformation System (UDTS) that will strengthen how we support students in their journey toward their academic and professional goals. Social policy researchers MDRC will provide additional evaluation support. With this collaboration, we hope that Durham Tech and our partner Lighthouse implementation colleges may become models for other community colleges developing data systems to promote innovation and student success.
A UDTS will allow the College to retrieve and analyze data from Colleague, Canvas, and Element 451 in one system. In addition to dashboards showing key student success outcomes, the platform employs a natural language interface that allows users to pose questions that support and advance their work to help students progress and successfully complete credentials.
Here’s a look at some proposed dashboards so you can get an idea of what information the project will provide:
Hopefully viewing these potential dashboards gives you ideas about how you might use these dashboards to gain greater insight into how to help students in your area of the College succeed.
Here are some potential uses of the Lighthouse Data Access Project to support our students’ successful enrollment, persistence, and completion of their goals here at Durham Tech.
- A Program Director might query this system to compare course success rates in synchronous online, asynchronous online, and seated sections of a course to inform scheduling.
- An Academic Advisor might use the system to determine completion rates for students who fulfill math requirements in their first semester versus those who take them in later semesters.
- A Student Support Specialist might learn about how use of student supports, such as visits to the Center for Academic Excellence, correlates with student persistence.
- A Dean seeking to identify ways to improve enrollment in a pathway might use the system to determine characteristics of students who are and who are not currently enrolling in the pathway.
Why It’s Important
The Lighthouse Data Access Project will enable us to support student success by connecting disparate data systems, empowering employees with clear, accessible data, and ensuring evidence-based decision-making on existing and future strategies. By understanding the story our data tells, we foster a culture of continuous improvement and contribute to economic mobility in our community.
What to Expect This Fall
Over a two-year grant period (2026–early 2028), Durham Tech will be working with our partners to codesign and test the UDTS. We’ll be calling upon employees from all areas of the College to identify student success needs, strengthen and systematize data use and governance, provide product testing, and integrate the new system into student support workflows.
Here’s what will happen this fall:
- We’ll be focused on strengthening our data governance structures.
- We will gain access to the UDTS using synthetic data first, and have the opportunity to explore the tool. We’ll be adding Durham Tech specific data this fall.
- August 17-18 our three partners in developing the Lighthouse Data Access Project, Achieving the Dream, DataKind, and MDRC, will visit, and many of you will be asked to participate in conversations about aligning this work with our new Strategic Plan.
- Also this fall we will be inviting employees to participate in professional development related to the UDTS, data literacy, and data governance.
If you have questions, please reach out to Susan Bowen or Lea Bingham.