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. 

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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.

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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.

Ohio University wanted to get started with analytics (business intelligence) but didn't have much money. This Campus Technology magazine case study explains how they did it and what they learned:

Also working to give input and feedback to Wykoff's team was a committee of various users. That committee, which has met weekly for a year and continues to meet and give input, includes representatives from budgeting, finance, the registrar, the bursar, and other academic personnel. As the group gains an understanding of just what BI solutions can do, Wykoff said, excitement is building. "There's starting to be a little line [of people] saying, "How can we get on the BI list and be next?'"

One lesson Wykoff offered as the project moves into its second year is this: Delivering the right data to end users through BI is an iterative process. "Once [users] see the data, they're going to ask a different set of questions [than the first time around], or realize some assumptions," she noted. That makes BI different from a more traditional software development project, in which user needs are researched, then a system is installed, modified, and left to run.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

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Here's your SCUP Link to "2010 Institutional Research Conference Roundup"

Inside Higher Ed's Doug Lederman reports out from the early days of the 2010 annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR). This report is about student retention and student retention rates. One interesting study from, Washtenaw Community College (MI), found that students transferring to 4-year schools did well, but that those who did best had been at the community college for shorter periods of time. We think Lederman's introduction nicely portrays institutional researchers:

Institutional researchers are higher education's version of a utility infielder. That doesn't mean they lack expertise: They specialize in bringing data to bear on issues and problems, and explaining and interpreting those data to campus constituents who often come at the information from widely varying viewpoints. Their versatility comes, though, in the wide range of subjects they touch and of decisions over which they have some influence.

Given that eclectic role, the annual forum of the Association for Institutional Research typically covers a plethora of topics, and this year's meeting, the organization's 50th, is no exception. But it is also true that examining the forum's agenda usually offers a sense of which issues are keeping institutional leaders up at night, since those are often the topics that presidents and provosts and other campus officials have asked their data gurus to dive into.

 

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

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Here's your SCUP Link to 7 Things You Should Know About Analytics (PDF)

This is part of the series of excellent brief summaries about Things You Should Know, published by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). They're all good resources, even better than Wikipedia   ;-0

Analytics tools provide statistical evaluation of rich data sources to discern patterns that can help individuals at companies, educational institutions, or governments make more informed de- cisions. In commercial usage, analytics software may evaluate data mined from purchasing records to allow a web-based retailer to suggest products that might interest customers or allow a search engine to target ads based on an individual’s location and demo- graphic data. Colleges and universities can harness the power of analytics to develop student recruitment policies, adjust course catalog offerings, determine hiring needs, or make financial deci- sions. In a teaching and learning context, data from such sources as the learning management system, college application forms, and library records can be used to build academic analytics pro- grams that use algorithms to construct predictive models that can identify students at risk for not succeeding academically.

Please scroll down to your SCUP Link, below this notice about SCUP–45.

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

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We’ve all heard the mantra: Do more with less. In the current economy, colleges and universities are continually being asked to be more productive and effective with ever-shrinking resources. A key to accomplishing that is to have a solid information system—an intergrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that can help them toward that goal in numerous ways.

[And . . . ]

The other big difference is a fundamental shift in the way our staff is being used. When we had our legacy system, most of our development staff was in maintenance and repair mode. Now we’re almost completely out of that mode and looking at how to create value-adding projects for our university.

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SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are:

• May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
• October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III