2021
Annual Impact Report

Each year, around 20% of students who enroll in higher education do not end up attending in the fall, in a phenomenon widely referred 
to as “summer melt”. The problem is most acute for students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, those in urban areas, and among people headed to community college, where, a study cites, 
as many as 40% of prospective students 
are impacted. From failure to fill out requisite forms and pay outstanding balances, to inability to locate critical syllabus information or acquire course materials, the reasons students fall victim to summer melt are many, and they are complicated.  It also stands to reason that, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and given a difficult economic situation and the ripple effect of two years embroiled in sporadic lockdowns, mental health crises and beyond, the number of people impacted by this phenomenon is certainly on the rise.

Mainstay – formerly AdmitHub – is a leading tool for institutions to combat summer melt, using a campus-branded enrollment chatbot. Mainstay uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to facilitate the path to 
and through college, providing students 
with college and career guidance and support to combat both summer melt and dropouts. Mainstay recently extended its offering to employers, helping new hires navigate their journey to and within companies.

A new study shows that one of the biggest enablers of a successful transition into the fold of higher education and through to completion may be the strategic use of virtual student support in the form of text-based reminders, like those provided through the Mainstay chatbot. The study shows that community college students, for example, who receive targeted, personalized text messages from an AI chatbot like Mainstay are more likely to complete tasks related to enrollment and retention, while those who do not may be left to navigate bureaucracy and administration on their own.

Through Georgia State University’s randomized, controlled trials into chatbot-based interventions conducted during the 2020-2021 academic year, GSU messaged 11,000 students attending the Perimeter campus; a two-year college where approximately 70% of students are eligible for Pell Grants, and where 85% are working while enrolled.

For decades, it has fallen to educators to curate what they have perceived to be the best digital teaching resources. Teachers often spend much of their time searching from a wide variety of open-source and proprietary content that helps them adhere to curriculum while differentiating instruction for learners. Classrooms, then, have become proving grounds for a “pick-and-mix” variety of tools and systems, and the burden placed on teachers to find differentiated resources for learners of all backgrounds and levels often detracts from their primary focus: teaching. The resulting landscape is one in which teachers are stretched thin and the consistency of educational delivery varies widely from school to school, let alone from district to district. The move to virtual instruction has, in many places, made that landscape even more chaotic.

Hāpara is a K-12 classroom management system that is built upon a cloud-based infrastructure, and is robust enough to deliver seamless and differentiated learning in both face-to-face and remote environments. 
The classroom ecosystem – built into a Chromebook environment – lets teachers and students access thousands of customizable and curriculum-aligned lessons and resources. Teachers access students’ work through Google Workspace, where they can offer timely formative feedback, and where they can check on the progress students are making and offer supportive feedback. Hāpara’s classroom management software lets teachers bring all of their Google Workspace tools, apps and resources into a mobile-friendly classroom workflow that – thanks to safeguarding tools – ensures students won’t be subjected to online distractions or threats. In short, Hāpara offers schools and districts the opportunity to move from an inconsistent approach to building and customizing curriculum, to a streamlined one in which schools have all the resources and tools they need in one place along with enough freedom to build learning experiences that work for their unique student bodies – no matter where they are.

In an effort to improve the state of academic efficacy in the province of Alberta for both 
in-person and online students, and to create 
a more level ground for students of all backgrounds amidst an ongoing pandemic, educators from ten school divisions would ultimately team up with Hāpara and the Edmonton Regional Learning Consortium to form the Alberta Collaboration for Learning (ACL).  Today, the Hāpara solution is available to 758,000 students and their teachers in Alberta.

Deskless workers represent more than 80% of the global workforce, yet are rarely represented in research and discussions about organizational culture, retention, and workplace shifts. Indeed, in much of the “future of work” discourse that has taken place in the wake of the pandemic, it has essentially been asserted that remote or hybrid work has become ubiquitous for all workers, when nothing could be further from the truth. Deskless workers, by their sheer numbers and given the critical nature of their roles in factories, warehouses, docks, ports, retail, supply chain, manufacturing, hospitality, the food industry, and in key infrastructure roles –  power the economy, yet corporate and “desked” workers receive the lion's share of attention. Deskless workers aren’t just underrepresented in the public dialogue, though, but also in the investment and workplace innovation space. Less than 1% of software venture funding, for example, is aimed at deskless workers. The lack of investment and attention paid to their day-to-day work and issues means that, for many deskless workspaces, the workplace has evolved little since the industrial revolution.

Anthill is a machine learning-enabled company that has created communications solutions for companies that employ deskless workers. Their software delivers personal and actionable workforce communication tools that can be synched up with existing software systems to ensure a seamless integration into a company’s existing tools for things like hours reporting or training and upskilling. 
From helping employees find skilling, upskilling and promotion opportunities, to helping employers better understand the workday issues facing employers, Anthill leverages mobile technology to give employers and employees better connection points in a space where the use of computers and email is rare, if nonexistent.

MC: I grew up in Alaska and most of the people I went to high school with went into a trade, working in supply chain, manufacturing or similar jobs. I know how common those jobs were, and I ended up in a doctoral program where I focused my research on deskless workers, and studied organizational psychology, with an emphasis on machine learning. What I learned was that, across HR research, less than 2% of studies out there include deskless workers, yet we know they make up 80% of the global workforce. In the pandemic context, that means 2.5 billion people don’t get to work remotely and never have. They’re in ports, warehouses, and factories, but never set foot in offices. Most of the ways we learn about and interact with employees in office jobs don’t work for deskless workers. So the question for me was: how do we build better solutions for this population so we can bring more dignity to these occupations? With the dearth of people going back to these jobs after the pandemic, we’ve been advising companies on what they can do to better bring deskless workers into the fold. That was the challenge we set for ourselves when we built Anthill.