Focus on Students Journey While Implementing Technology

David Morales, CIO and Senior Vice President of Technology, Western Governors University

As the CIO and Senior Vice President of Technology at Western Governors University, David Morales is responsible and accountable for ensuring all the technical aspects within the organization function correctly, from infrastructure to security. He ensures all the data is managed according to the right security practices. Morales takes care of the software development process and ensures they use effective platforms for product and project management. He ensures a project is moving in the right direction while exploring emerging technologies and innovative approaches to bring up solutions for students to develop and grow their careers as they want to.

What are the current challenges in the education space?

Most educational institutions and universities struggle to find the right talent attached to their organization's mission. Hiring the right technical individuals and retaining these talents are the biggest challenges. We have to assign them relevant projects that enable them to create new products and innovate the way an institution or university operates.

“Focus on the experience of your students and enhance those experiences by providing the right or just-in-time interventions”

Another challenge that universities face, especially when it comes to higher education, is technology selection, adoption, and implementation. Every university is different and has different technological needs. We cannot take an out-of-the-box solution, implement it and get it up and running. We have to customize solutions according to our operational needs. There are many caveats in the way traditional universities operate. They have to make significant changes to their infrastructure to ensure they effectively utilize the technology and software. So bringing the right technology partners to work with is also a significant challenge, but it is the key to being successful in technology implementation within the organization.

Could you tell us about any project initiative that you are working on currently on? 

Currently, we are working on many projects, but the common denominator across all of them is how we utilize machine learning. We are taking the student data and using machine learning to understand the data in a better way. This is helping us offer the just-in-time interventions to students that they need to achieve the success they're looking for. We are leveraging the knowledge and understanding of different data points of a student and transforming these insights into something useful for them.

At Western Governors University, we constantly focus on ensuring that our students make progress they desire in their personalized journey to obtain the credentials. We believe that obtaining these credentials is the shortest path to opportunity. So we are analyzing different data points to deliver students the best-personalized experience. Most of the projects that we are working on are focused on collecting and understanding the data to help students across all the different pieces of their journey.

How do you see the education space would evolve in a few years?

Many companies and industries are utilizing AI to enhance their customers' experience through different products. Similarly, in higher education, we need to seek all those data points that enable us to enhance the experience for students and help them achieve their objectives faster than anticipated. In the coming years, higher education institutions will collect data points from the entire student journey. This includes the moment a student shows a desire to attend a university, insights on what is the best program an individual can register for within the zip code that they live in to be successful after graduation to how they are learning and progressing in the different classes.

To collect all those data points, universities need to implement technologies that are event-driven. We need to collect data on all the events happening in students' life to create AI models that will enhance their experience.

In essence, the future of technological advancement in higher education is creating technology that enables institutions to collect data points of different events in the students' life and utilize these data points to allow a better experience for students.

What would be your piece of advice for your fellow peers? 

My piece of advice for my fellow peers is to focus on the experience of your students and enhance those experiences by providing the right or just-in-time interventions. Historically, we didn't focus on bringing technology to students' life and helping streamline their journey. But today, we must concentrate on serving our students as much as possible and enabling them to obtain credentials and achieve their goals, as they are the nation's future.

Machine Learning

Project Management