The need to make student data more accessible and digestible was a common refrain at the panel, part of the annual Educause conference that kicked off this week in Chicago, featuring Tom Andriola, vice chancellor of IT and data at the University of California at Irvine; Patty Morales, vice provost of enrollment management at UC Irvine; and Gary Moser, CIO of the Kern Community College District. Featured as part of a pre-conference workshop hosted by Amazon Web Services, the panelists discussed strategies for data management, as well as their experience using data management systems such as those offered by AWS. They said that through the use of systems like these and recent advances in AI, IT staff and administrators can significantly reduce how much time they spend on data management while making it easier for faculty to access comprehensive information on students’ backgrounds to tailor their approach to advising.
According to Morales, student data with background information has proven useful to faculty at UC Irvine for a variety of intervention strategies to help individual students stay on track to graduation. She said before the university’s current approach to data interoperability, faculty didn’t have as comprehensive a view of their students, making it harder to advise and instruct them.
“There is a [large amount of information] that advisers and other administrators need to know to do their job, and those things can be harder to know if you're sitting in another office, whether it's IT, a budget office or anywhere else,” she said. “You don't necessarily have an insight into what other departments have to do. But all of these items, we can address in [our system].”
Morales said faculty can use data from systems like theirs to predict student behavior or get a sense of challenges they might be facing in order to help get them back on track sooner rather than later.
“The challenge is in organizing it in ways that it's not overwhelming,” she said, noting that making the data easy to access and understand makes it more actionable.
Moser said it’s important to make sure data can be used and viewed across departments and between instructors, advisers and other faculty so they can formulate strategies to improve student performance. He added that external data can also be helpful.
“We want to make sure our students are successful," he said. "So, in order to do that, we want to make sure that we clarify [the importance of] working in partnership with various groups within our organization."
