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Quote of the Week

We're next headed away from hard, confined definitions of learning timeframes. We're trying to change from the old agricultural cycle—or whatever it is that semesters are currently based on, because nobody really knows—to cycles based on learning outcomes. That might mean a course could take two years and other courses could take three weeks. How can we allow students to individualize their learning in a structured institution? We're looking to use technology and analytics to help us move into a much less constrained time structure.

Diana Oblinger, of EDUCAUSE, interviewing Michael M. Crow, president of ASU. These are two of SCUP’s favorite prognosticators. Where do they think higher ed is going? Worth a look at ‘No More Excuses’: Michael M. Crow on Analytics. 

 ^{Go directly to the original of the resource described below.}

Staff writers at OnlineUniversities.com have compiled a list that is very useful as a somewhat focused environmental scan. One of the fifteen suggestions is to essentially create nutrition label equivalents for majors: Nutrition facts for majors (This link goes to a fascinating blog post about college costs and what a set of nutritional facts might look like for an unnamed private university in California, using information scrabbled together from various websites.)

Restaurants often show calorie counts on their menus, and some experts recommend that programs of study do the same. With a transparent explanation of tuition, fees, salary, student loan payments, and job market prospects, students can have a better idea of what they’re getting into if they choose to pursue a degree that does not fill the need for a high-demand industry.

Monday, July 25, 2011, 8:30 AM–9:45 AM

For the past several months, SCUPer Donald M. Norris has been interviewing leaders in the field of analytics, with regard to higher education. He has summarized best practices and vision in the white paper this post is titled after is also subtitled: "Insights on the Leading Edge From Interviews With Vendors, Practitioners, and Thought Leaders." It can be downloaded at the Public Forum on Action Analytics. 

The following quotation is from page 7,  "Five Insights From the Vendors":

• First, greater affordability and substantial pressure for continuing cost reductions was a pervasive theme. Institutions are demanding this and the vendors are responding. Vendors expressed the desire to provide analytics solutions for any type of institution, and touted examples of community colleges, small professional schools, and mid-sized universities that had deployed affordable analytics applications. The financial crisis will accelerate the affordability imperative.

• Second, the need is widely recognized for analytics that are designed and delivered for the masses and are user friendly and widely available. While some power-user-based reports will continue to be “pushed” out to users, over time analytics increasingly will be “pulled” by ever more sophisticated end users using applications crafted for the masses.

• Third, multi-vendor analytics environments on many campuses will continue to be the norm. Many leading-edge institutions are hedging their bets against a single vendor solution. Indeed, no single vendor solution exists for the multitude of analytics needs and opportunities necessary to achieve the ultimate solution – Action Analytics.

• Fourth, the conversation about new analytics capabilities is closely linked to the emergence of the enterprise technology that will succeed LMS 1.0. On the exhibit floor and in the hallways at EDUCAUSE 2010, a favorite topic of conversation centered on “What is your next LMS decision going to be?” Institutional leaders are exploring many options, including no formal LMS at all. These conversations inevitably included enhancing the analytics that existing LMSs have been unable to provide or support adequately.

• Fifth, there is greater sophistication in talking about the future uses of affordable analytics among vendors and campus executives: presidents, provosts, CFOs, CIOs, and campus planners. Over the past several years, the ERP, LMS, and Analytics vendors have been educating the marketplace – and one another – on how to move beyond the limitations of the existing ERP and LMS stacks. What new analytics needs will be required to deal with emerging institutional needs. Likewise, campus leaders have been facing greater pressure to provide accountability statistics and to improve performance, which requires embedded, formative analytics.

Larry Goodwin, president of The College of St. Scholastica writes, in Solving the "It's My Data' Mess, about the trials and tribulations of implementing a business intelligence platform for a small, private institution. The article is from University Business magazine. If it is reflective of the essays in the book linked-to below, then both are well worth a read for their perspective on the processes involved.

[P]utting the BI system into operation was not easy. The difficulty was not technological or quantitative; it was political: Who controls the fundamental data definitions? In the meetings of a large committee established to implement BI, it became obvious that people whose primary interests were tactical and departmental couldn’t agree on common definitions. Senior administration had to take hands-on control—our second lesson learned. ...

A BI system can be costly ($250,000 for us up front) and require significant staff training (intensive for key users for three to eight weeks; ongoing, more moderate, for a year). But the payback is generous and quick. Data reporting has increased ten-fold. Time spent retrieving information has been reduced 50 to 75 percent. Collections work that took a monthly half day now takes less than a minute. The controller saves over eight hours each semester on reconciling numbers. And so forth. Best of all, data is reliable and consistent, allowing for accurate and integrated planning, budgeting, and assessment.

It is excerpted from President to President: Views on Technology in Higher Education Volume II, published by Sungard Higher Ed and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC). That entire publication can be downloaded as a PDF at no cost here.

Last week, we had the welcome opportunity to attend the second Action Analytics Symposium in St. Paul, MN. Doug Lederman, of Inside Higher Ed was also there. He moderated a panel discussion. Here's his report on the symposium and other, related movements aimed at getting better data-informed decisions made about student learning:

Those behind Action Analytics wouldn't dare assert that they have a clear solution to that problem, but they left last week's meeting vowing to keep attacking it. They plan to convene national experts in a Web-based community of practice, and to test out concepts locally in the Twin Cities, involving not just the host institutions but the mammoth University of Minnesota, too. While some participants expressed concern that the continuing economic woes in the states would discourage progress on this front -- since "bad times sometimes erode away what was innovative," said [SCUP board member Linda] Baer of MnSCU -- others argued that the combination of economic necessity and continued external pressure from federal and state policy makers would compel college leaders to find new ways to improve their own performance. "If we don't," said [Aimee] Guidera of the Data Quality Campaign, "we will go the way of newsprint."

The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Tech Therapy" section interviews Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, about the value of analytics for higher education leaders. (We recommend moving the slider over and beginning to listen to the podcast at 15 minutes in unless you want to hear a couple of ads and some talk about iPads.)

The first story Hrabowski tells is about a discussion with a senior faculty member in engineering who, anecdotal information, was firm in his belief that everyone who started after a PhD in that program got one. Hrabowski notes that he had hard data that it was more like 50 percent, and was able to get data-informed decisions made. Why did the professor think everyone finished? Perhaps because the students who did not finish were not very visible to him as they slipped through the cracks. With the data, the school was able to better address retention issues.

Data visualization ought to be a shared area of interest among SCUPers in areas ranging from strategic and institutional direction planning, through academic and resource and budget planning, and also facilities planning and design. The video about data visualization we are sharing is titled Journalism in the Age of Data, which might appear to be divergent from the interests of the SCUP constituency, but it's an excellent primer on understanding the use of data visualization techniques to make sense of sometimes incomprehensible data.

Like it or not, this is something planners will have in their core toolbox in 10 years. And here's a link to a website where you can get some hands-on play with data visualization.

The Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities (AGB) has published the results of a study about governing boards and student learning assessment. The following quote is from a Chronicle article about the survey results. You can download the entire report from the AGB: How Boards Oversee Educational Quality. As well, AGB offers the book Making the Grade: How Boards Can Ensure Academic Quality, by Peter Ewell.

The report, "How Boards Oversee Educational Quality: A Report on a Survey on Boards and the Assessment of Student Learning," is based on a survey conducted in November 2009 that asked 1,300 chief academic officers and chairs of board committees on academic affairs how boards oversee academic quality. The response rate was 38 percent, with 28 percent of trustees and 58 percent of chief academic officers participating. Almost one-quarter of the respondents were from public institutions, and three-quarters were from private institutions.

Results of the survey were mixed, Ms. Johnston said. While slightly more than half of respondents said boards spend more time discussing student-learning outcomes now than they did five years ago, 61.5 percent said boards do not spend sufficient time in meetings on the issue. A smaller proportion—38.5 percent—said enough time was spent on the subject in board meetings.

"There is plenty of room for improvement," Ms. Johnston said

 SCUP board member Linda Baer, formerly of MnSCUP and now with the Gates Foundation, explains Action Analytics - background and potential - to SCUP's board of directors.

Part 1 of 4:

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Part 3 of 4

Part 4 of 4