Flinders University builds a centralized analytics portal on Databricks for near real-time student insights

Overview

Flinders University used the Databricks Data + AI Platform on Microsoft Azure, with Delta Lake and MLflow, to build the Flinders Intelligence Portal (FLIP), a centralized self-service analytics portal replacing week-long manual data requests with near real-time reporting on student enrollment, well-being and performance.

The challenge

With a student population of over 25,000, Flinders University's large volumes of siloed student, financial, research and education data hindered near real-time insight; gaining access to information was slow, usually taking up to a week, due to legacy on-premises infrastructure, and there was often uncertainty around the reliability and completeness of the resulting data.

The solution

Flinders adopted Microsoft Azure and the Databricks Data + AI Platform, using Delta Lake as the foundation of its lakehouse architecture to build the Flinders Intelligence Portal (FLIP), a centralized self-service analytics portal, alongside Power BI and Azure Data Factory; the Databricks platform along with MLflow also lets the team build, train, manage and deploy machine learning and deep learning models at scale.

Reported business value

University management can now gain a clear, consistent view of student enrollment with daily reports that used to take up to a week to generate, and the analytics team runs predictive models to streamline automation and model delivery around student behaviors, student success and financial modeling; Databricks also helped reduce technology costs and increase capacity, scale, performance and capability.