Personalizing the Student Experience
My almost half-century career in postsecondary education has been an interesting mix of both researcher and practitioner. My years of experience taught me to temper the rigour of theory and what ‘should’ be done, with the reality of the Canadian college context and what ‘could’ be done. Whether in a Quebec CEGEP or an Ontario college, my focus as a professor or administrator was on the micro and the macro; student success and institutional effectiveness. The goal was to achieve institutional effectiveness, at least in part, by maximizing student success. This made sense.
In my various roles I developed instruments, processes and procedures to collect information about college students, the key factors influencing their
performance and persistence, the quality of programs and services, organizational culture, quality of customer service, accountability measures and enrollment management strategies. It is the knowledge and resources gained from this experience and the current research literature that serve as the core business of PSE Information Systems.
Our core value is to provide the highest quality, personalized solutions to the institutional need for information regarding performance, effectiveness and quality assurance. Our commitment is to create the solution that is right for each institution and to provide this in a timely and cost-effective fashion.
My professional experience combined with my doctoral research led to a vision of providing postsecondary education learning opportunities and environments in a dramatically different way. Rather than the dominant institutional paradigm based on a 20th century, industrial age ‘batch processing’ concept that delivers ‘one size fits all’ learning environments, this would be replaced by a 21st century model bound to the information age that emphasizes the need to provide ‘managed learning opportunities’ for individual students. Not surprisingly therefore, a primary service of PSE Information Systems is providing the necessary institutional tools to those who wish to pursue the deployment of a ‘personalized’ model of postsecondary education.
