Challenge
Keeping Higher Education Accessible
Founded in 2017, Modern States Education Alliance is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving access to college education across the United States. As the cost of higher education continues its rapid rise, a college degree is becoming increasingly inaccessible, particularly for those in underserved communities.
To reduce the financial burden of higher education and help students achieve their goals faster, Modern States designs free courses that prepare learners for the College Level Examination Program (CLEP), which enables students to earn college credit at nearly 3,000 colleges and universities nationwide by demonstrating what they know through standardized tests. The organization also covers the CLEP exam fee for learners who have passed its courses.
Modern States uses an online platform to deliver the courses, providing a flexible environment for busy learners and supporting scalable operations.
“Our mission at Modern States is to keep a college education affordable and accessible for anybody who wants one,” says Jefferson Pestronk, executive director at Modern States, “and delivering our courses online is essential to that. Once our courses are built and online, we can offer them to 10 students or we can offer them to 10,000 students and it costs basically the same amount of money.”
Modern States migrated its online learning platform to the D2L Brightspace learning management system in 2024. Since then, the organization has been on a continuous improvement journey, refining the content to ensure the learner experience is as smooth and consistent as possible. As its next step, it aims to gain holistic insight into learner behavior to drive evidence-based improvements and support stronger outcomes.
Solution
Deploying Comprehensive Learning Analytics
Modern States approached the D2L Learning Analytics team for support with making the most of the Brightspace Performance+ package. The Learning Analytics team helped design, build and refine standardized dashboards covering hundreds of metrics across the entire learner journey pipeline, from enrollment and course completion to registering for and passing a CLEP exam. Now Modern States can track learners across the entire pipeline or investigate specific milestones by using side-by-side comparisons to assess performance rapidly across different subgroups and at different times.
The Student Journey Dashboard highlights login trends, course enrollments and enrollment trends, course engagement, and learner retention, helping Modern States identify bottlenecks in learner success and tailor interventions for specific populations to boost the CLEP exam pass rates. For example, login trends are a key metric to identify and remediate points in the onboarding journey where user engagement begins to decline or where technical or systemic issues may prevent access to the platform. Significantly, by integrating data from CLEP exams and sorting learners into successful, near-miss and unsuccessful performance bands, Modern States can also assess how effective the quizzes in its courses are at helping students prepare.
Within the dashboard, learners can be categorized based on their behaviors, such as active learners or passive consumers and casual explorers or selective achievers. These categories enlighten the Modern States leadership team on learner motivations and help with the creation of tailored support. For example, a casual explorer may need more structured onboarding to encourage further engagement.
The dashboard also includes state-level and ZIP-level maps showing the geographic reach of the program. At the same time, a breakdown of learner demographics—whether they enrolled through an institution or independently, and their race, gender, military status and more—helps the organization identify outcome gaps and empowers a more targeted approach to partner engagement. The dashboard also integrates external institution-level data, allowing Modern States to contextualize performance further.
An Anomaly Analysis report takes cues such as interaction speed, quiz completion time and exam results relative to content engagement to flag patterns for further investigation. This helps Modern States adjust support based on individual circumstances, prevent misuse and maintain fairness across the program.
Approaching Transformation Objectively
As Modern States worked to upgrade its courses with the D2L Brightspace platform, it also wanted to ensure that the new course versions were delivering objective benefits compared to the legacy content. Working with D2L, the organization created a Course Version Dashboard, which enables side-by-side comparison of learner performance between the different course versions. This data supports stronger decision-making around course upgrades as well as helps validate investment in improvements. At the same time, Modern States introduced pre- and post-course surveys to capture learner expectations and outcomes of the upgraded courses, ensuring learner voices have direct impact on program design.
Modern States also designed a Demo Dashboard to enable external presentations, training and testing. A set of artificial intelligence-generated data designed to mimic real learner data is used to create a realistic interactive environment within the Performance+ platform, showcasing platform capabilities without compromising learners’ data privacy.
Enabling Tailored Insight for Stakeholders
Modern States and D2L developed a dedicated Auditor Dashboard, consolidating data from various Student Journey reports into an intuitive interface. Auditors can monitor milestones, identify learners at risk and intervene proactively both at course level and with individual students. To reinforce robust data security, the Auditor Dashboard is locked down with row-level security, ensuring that each auditor can access information only about the learners assigned to them.
To ensure clarity and consistency across the analytics ecosystem and to support staff training, Modern States and D2L also created a data dictionary that defines every metric used across all its dashboards. Ensuring that all reports use the same terms and definitions means that leadership team can more easily lead strategic discussions and present information to partners.
Result
Driving Evidence-Based Results
With analytics enabled by D2L Performance+ and support from D2L Learning Analytics, Modern States has positioned itself to make data-driven decisions and further refine its program, accelerating growth and supporting higher success rates. The transition to D2L Brightspace has already helped boost CLEP exam pass rates by 5 percentage points, which means thousands of learners now have more cost-effective access to a college degree.
“We are able to watch a learner’s journey from the time they sign up for a Modern States account through to the point at which they take a CLEP exam and we get their scores back,” says Pestronk. “We can understand what success looks like from the level of the individual learner all the way up to the hundreds of thousands of learners that we serve each year. That lets us figure out where we need to put more time and attention, where we need to rethink how we’re teaching something, and where we need to develop new content. And then part of what’s cool about it is that once we make a change, every learner will benefit from that improvement.”
With stronger feedback loops, automated workflows and actionable insights, Modern States can focus on executing strategy instead of gathering data or relying on anecdotal reports. At the same time, the rich contextual data supports the organization in communicating impact clearly to funders, partners and other stakeholders, as well as supporting fundraising efforts for this life-changing program.
“Everything we do is informed by data that we’re getting out of D2L Brightspace,” concludes Pestronk.
Interviewee:
- Jefferson Pestronk, Executive Director