Inside Risepoint University Partners’ Strong Student Outcomes Across Nursing, Business, and Social Work

A Winthrop University social work student had just finished searching for social service resources in her community. Before the next module opened, she was asked a single question.

“Did this activity increase your knowledge of social service resources within your community?” Her answer, and her classmates’, reached the faculty team while the course was still running. This kind of in-course feedback is one of many subtle online education design choices favored by Risepoint, an edtech company with a unique approach to supporting online programs for nursing, business, and social work.

The Importance of Feedback Timing

Most online quality assessment works in the other direction. Course evaluations, accreditor surveys, and institutional quality reviews collect student experiences after a term ends: useful for the next cohort, but of little value to the one currently enrolled.

A 2024 study published in the Online Learning Journal found that despite extensive scholarship on feedback model design, there remains sparse empirical evidence that institutions have systematically closed the gap between collecting student feedback and acting on it in time to change a course while it’s still running. Erin Crisp, writing in EDUCAUSE Review, described the challenge in terms of lag. Standard quality measures simply arrive too late to inform current students’ experience.

The Risepoint-supported online MSW program at Winthrop was built to avoid that problem. Christopher Ward, the program’s coordinator, gave Risepoint learning designers direct credit: “A large part of our success has been from the relationship, the education, and the development that has come from the Risepoint learning designers to our faculty.”

Ward named a specific causal chain: learning designers used feedback and real-time implementation strategies to help faculty build better courses, and the courses became more dynamic. Another Online Learning Journal study on instructional design practice found that quality in online programs emerges from daily practitioner refinement, from the accumulated decisions that go into how assignments are ordered, how feedback arrives, and how courses evolve in incremental steps.

Cost vs. Value in Massachusetts Online Education

At Fitchburg State University, a public institution in north-central Massachusetts competing against more than 100 colleges and universities within a 50-mile radius, the Risepoint partnership that began in 2017 had a specific competitive goal: make the university’s online programs visible and competitive in a crowded market.

By fall 2021, the RN-to-BSN online program ranked second in Massachusetts by total online nursing enrollment, according to data from NC-SARA and the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing. The online MBA placed fifth in the state for 2021-degree conferrals, behind only Harvard, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Boston University, and Babson College, according to Lightcast data.

Average total tuition came to roughly $13,000. Between 2017 and 2022, enrollment in Fitchburg’s online programs grew fivefold, on the strength of a program affordable enough to compare favorably with local options and rigorous enough to place competitively in the state’s degree conferral data.

The Persistence Data

Across the sector as a whole, student attrition costs U.S. higher education $10.72 billion a year, with first-year students accounting for nearly half those losses. That figure lives in enrollment data, in the students who arrived, started, and then stopped. But the metric that gets closest to whether a program is working is how many students keep going past their early terms.

Third-term persistence, the share of students who continue into their third term of enrollment, is a leading indicator of completion. Students who reach that threshold finish at higher rates. Those who stop before are less likely to return.

The National Student Clearinghouse found that persistence at primarily online institutions runs at 60.8%, measured as the share of students who return after their first year. Across Fitchburg State’s Risepoint-supported graduate programs, third-term persistence averaged 78.3%.

At the University of Illinois Springfield, where Risepoint helped launch a portfolio of online business and technology programs in 2021, third-term persistence reached 72% through 2023. Somnath Bhattacharya, dean of the College of Business and Management, had set a goal of 300 enrollments within three years; the program reached 97% of that number in twelve months. Enrollment climbed to 543 by September 2023.

Three Programs, One Design Logic

Social work in South Carolina. Nursing in Massachusetts. Business analytics, cybersecurity, and finance in Illinois. The disciplines are different. So are the student populations, institution sizes, and labor markets. What the programs share is a design approach that built completion into program architecture from the start, with feedback systems calibrated to reach instructors while a course was still in session, before the moment to adjust it had passed.

In every partnership with Risepoint, the university retains full academic ownership, including curriculum, admissions, instruction, and financial aid. The company provides learning design support to faculty, as well as technology infrastructure, marketing, and operational support across online programs. But that infrastructure layer of learning design is often where activity sequencing, feedback timing, and the structure of student interaction get determined.