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HELM

Higher-Ed Learning & Momentum Data Model

HELM is a living, open, common data model for higher-education student success—built as a shared public good to track progress and make learner data portable across tools and institutions.

Overview

HELM is a living, open, common data model for higher-education student success—built as a shared public good to track progress and make learner data portable across tools and institutions.

Higher education institutions rely on dozens of edtech systems, each built on its own proprietary and often opaque data model. The result is a fragmented student data landscape that is hard to integrate, difficult to interpret, and frequently incomplete. Institutional research and data teams spend hundreds of engineering hours reconciling mismatched schemas and maintaining brittle pipelines. And while integration frameworks exist, fewer than half of institutions use any one of them—none offering the comprehensive, interoperable foundation needed for holistic student support.

This siloed ecosystem limits the achievement of student success outcomes. Students lack a complete, portable picture of their learning experience. Campus administrators are resource-constrained and forced to make decisions with partial information. Innovators face high barriers to building solutions that work across institutions. Regulators struggle to harmonize data and enable clear, consistent reporting and measurement against targets.

The HELM data model project aims to change this. It is a living, open, common data model for higher-education student success—built as a shared public good to track progress and make learner data portable across tools and institutions.

A Focus on Collaborative Action

HELM is a public-good initiative launched in late 2025 to move from a research-designed model to one that is operational inside real edtech products. It is user-focused and community-driven, stewarded by DataKind.

You can follow project progress on this website, join the Software Advisory Group, and contribute on GitHub. We are actively looking for community members to help shape HELM’s governance, benchmarking strategy, and living roadmap. As the project grows, we’re eager to partner with institutions and innovators to define priority use cases and support implementation.

HELM expects to convene in community gatherings alongside DREAM 2026 and Complete College America 2026.

Driving Toward Key Outcomes

In the short term, HELM intends to deliver:

In Fall 2026, HELM plans to host its first Connectathon, bringing institutions and innovators together for a high-energy prototyping event. Participants will demonstrate how HELM enables education systems to share and use learner data more effectively—and showcase new tools and insights that become possible on top of a common model.

Stewarding a Knowledge Ecosystem

HELM will be delivered not just as a data model, but as a full public-good ecosystem: shared documentation, implementation code, and community-maintained guidance.

HELM will also operate as a learning community, producing regular co-design insight briefs and sector-compiled guides and toolkits for benchmarking, quality standards, and transformation tolerances—so adopters can implement confidently and evolve together.

Recent and Upcoming Activities