Beginning in 2021 BSU partnered with Heliocampus to build our first institutional Data Warehouse (if you’d like to see the technical details please see our blog post [DWH Technology]. IRDS has developed an analytics plan that we’re executing on. Over time the fruits of that effort will become more and more visible across campus. Below we describe in brief a few of the advancements we’ve made recently.

The first tangible outcomes of the analytics plan were the university Core dashboards. These dashboards cover the basics of admissions, enrollment, completions, and student success. If you’d like to read more about the Core dashboards and whether you may need access, please read What is Tableau’s Best Use. If you would like to request access please submit the request form.

As of Day Tracking

In order to provide leadership with a daily view of our ongoing registrations we have prepared two views that update daily. The first is the As of Day Student Enrollment and it shows enrollment progress as of each day compared to prior years at the same point in the semester. The Retention As of Day Percentage is similar but it shows the percentage of students returning. We have also provided a “What If” analysis to help understand how many students a school or department must retain in order to achieve a user-selected retention goal. These operational reports help Deans and others evaluate ongoing efforts to improve student retention via outreach and other methods.

 

Data Science

An exciting part of the analytics agenda is the development of machine learning models to support important university goals. We have recently begun to leverage our data warehouse to be able to develop data science with our Heliocampus partner. There will be a great deal more to say about this as the project progresses. In the initial stages we are focusing on the factors in student retention that are most likely to predict student attrition. We plan to put this information in the hands of the right staff to help retain those students with targeted interventions.

 

Learn more about Data Warehouse from the resource below:

Introduction to the Data Warehouse