A new academic year is underway at Rize and we are excited to share a few statistics across the LCMC on the Fall 2024 semester.
Registrations into Rize powered courses continue to climb each semester. From quite humble beginnings, this fall we have over 4,525 registrations across the LCMC. This represents ~50% growth year-over-year and 360% growth since Fall 2022.
My first semester at Rize was Fall 2020, so I always look back to it as an anchor point. This semester there are 7 individual courses that have more registrations than the total consortium 4 years ago.
As an important reminder, Rize and the LCMC cap section sizes to ensure small class sizes. This aggregate growth is increasing the number of course sections rather than the size of those sections!
Growing registrations is a nice trend, but we are even more focused on growing the quality of courses. One thing we discuss at Rize is how we can use scale to improve quality, rather than seeing scale as a naturally degrading force.
So how can scale drive quality? I believe Rize actually has an unfair advantage. The Rize consortium model comprises a relatively narrow and stable catalog of courses that are run with more students than the typical small college. This allows Rize, the curriculum committees, our instructional designers and the teaching institutions to continually take a larger data set (and revenue) from prior semesters and reinvest back into improvements.
The table below shows the percent of students who believe their courses powered by Rize outperform their expectations for online and on-campus courses. It also shows the change in a “likelihood to recommend” score that we have been tracking from the earliest semesters.
The conclusion is that quality is in fact scaling with quantity. While at some point this improvement will need to flatten out, our team is laser focused on preserving the trend line for this academic year.
Digging one layer deeper, we are often asked which programs are “most popular” within the consortium, so we visualized the top 5 programs by registrations.
Computer Science and Digital Marketing have held the top 2 spots for several semesters. Cybersecurity continues to gain ground as the fastest growing program.
These are three of the programs we invested heavily in "refreshing" this year to be even more outcomes oriented. If you're interested in learning about the enhancements we made, check out our program specific webinars this week.
While not on this page, it is also worth flagging that AI for Everyone has 140 registrations in its first semester, making it the most popular first semester for any course in Rize history.
Here’s to another great academic year!
