University of NSW taps Accenture & Altis Consulting for Microsoft AI pilot

Accenture and Sydney data and analytics firm Altis Consulting have rolled out a Microsoft AI solution for the University of NSW (UNSW) that provides early detection of students at risk of academic failure.

The solution is part of UNSW's Data Insights for Student Learning and Support project, which aims to connect at-risk students with support services.

Known as the Academic Success Monitor (ASM), the solution uses a predictive machine learning model trained on historical data from learning and administration systems.

The model identifies potential academic risks based on student engagement in their digital learning environment.

The ASM was built using Microsoft Azure, Azure Machine Learning Studio, Azure OpenAI Service and Power Apps.

“By engaging our support services, we’ve been able to understand the language they use, the types of student personas they see, and how the syntax they use in their communications escalates at different risk levels,” said Simon McIntyre, UNSW's director of educational innovation.

“So, we’re using this information to build a matrix and then feeding it to the AI model."

After a successful pilot in 2023, in 2024 UNSW rolled out the ASM for 80 courses that encompassed around 17,000 students and 83 academics.

It identified 284 students who were at risk of failing and provided academics with updates and insights about student engagement in their class.

In addition, 75 per cent of academics stated the ASM identified potential risks much earlier than previously possible, and 49 per cent of students who received alerts from the system showed statistically significant increases in class engagement, Microsoft said.

“We had data scattered across the university and it isn’t necessarily unified. So, my team worked extensively with our UPP [UNSW Planning and Performance] and IT teams to set up a data lake that could use AI and ML at scale,” McIntyre said.

” The support of Microsoft and their partner Accenture really helped us kickstart everything through the co-development of a prototype in the Power Apps Innovation Centre Program."

"Our CIDO [chief data and insights officer] and Altis then helped wire custom configurations [of our Microsoft technology stack] together, which we wouldn’t have been able to do as quickly on our own.” 

UNSW plans to roll out the ASM to all first-year students and teaching staff at the start of 2025 and then reach all of its over 80,000 students and over 7,000 staff by the following year.

It is also working with Microsoft Industry Solutions Delivery to explore further AI use cases.

“We’re also working on prototyping an orchestrator-style chatbot architecture with multiple AI bots underneath to act as personal concierges,” said McIntyre.

“We’ve already got a modest pilot project starting in the latter half of the year exploring the use of AI bots for roles such as student-facing administrative support, academic support on interpreting course information and lecture notes, and future student recruitment.”