Janice Hill, Columbus State University

• Process:
  • Define KPI’s : grades,  starting degree, ending degree, and many more.
  • Design and Implement : ODI integrator
    • Subject area example : summation helps reports only pull one row per student.
    • Updating : degrees awarded only loaded at end of term.
  • Validation of data : Work with Institutional Research to figure out where wrong. Consulting with individuals who think data did not look right.
  • Production release : Start a new cycle.
• Data elements:
  • Banner, PeopleSoft, Excel spreadsheets
  • student head count, student attempted credit hours, and about 30 others.
• Dashboards : 8 in production, 2 in completed validation, 2 subject areas ready to be built. Changes to a dashboard not saved across sessions, so users need to export to a file.
• Structure of Dashboard : Level prompts : College, department, program, major, term. Analysis. Footnotes.
• Users with access : President, VP, Deans, Dept heads.
• Export types : PDF, Excel, Web,
• Errors: BI data loaded at 6am, so local data pulled at 9am WILL result in very small differences.
• Progression dashboard : credit hours by term, avg GPA by class, avg GPA vs credit hours earned, demographic breakdowns, grades by academic level, grades by section
• Retention and Graduation dashboard : after 1 year, after 6 years. Use both counts and percentages.
• Talk with faculty about their data needs so can show it exists or build it into a report.
• Individualized training. Understanding how to filter is a challenging concept.
• User tracking enabled, so know how long they stay on a dashboard, filters used, the SQL used.
• Try to use as little filters as possible. Her job to get the data. User’s job is to interpret.
• Decisions and policy affected by this data.
• Trying to get grade data to improve early warning.
• What are the products for which they want analytics?
• Using University System of Georgia requirements for retention, so pegged to Fall enrollment. “Some times you have to go past what makes sense to you and implement the rule.”

Excellent session!