WCET, the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, has been awarded $2.56 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to validate and extend the PAR Framework Project, ongoing research into the use of predictive analytics on a large-scale federated database to support decision making that removes barriers to student success. For more than a year, WCET has directed the project, which pools the efforts and contributed anonymized (de-identified) student data and course records (now more that one million records) from currently 16 participating institutions in order to identify trends and patterns that can predict student success. The new funding will support the ongoing validation of the project's data definitions and the extension of data model development and other related research and analysis protocols into 2014.
http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2012/08/28/Looking-at-Student-Success-Through-a-Multi-Institutional-Lens.aspx