Case Study: Florida State University achieves improved student success and operational efficiency with Cloudera

Florida State University Boosting student success and powering decision-making through big data

Florida State University’s Office of Distance Learning (ODL) supports LMS reporting for over 40,000 students and 3,000 instructors but faced data silos, manual processes, recurring storage capacity limits, and data loss that blocked advanced analytics and timely interventions. With retention and graduation metrics critical to the university’s mission—and practical issues like unpredictable testing-center demand—ODL needed a secure, scalable way to consolidate data and surface actionable insights.

By deploying a unified Cloudera big data platform, ODL now ingests Canvas and other sources into a single environment, uses Apache Spark ML (e.g., logistic regression) to predict at‑risk students and detect cheating, and leverages Impala/Hive for daily reporting and trend analysis. The change enabled earlier interventions, improved cross‑department decision‑making, more efficient testing‑center scheduling with lower staffing costs and shorter lines, simplified the technology stack and reduced costs—and opened the door to 30+ additional data-driven use cases.

Florida State University

Mary Eichin

Assistant Director for Technology