Creating effective dashboards that tell the right story can help users of the data make the best decisions. Analyzing data in a way that help users make use of dashboards and data can aid in faculty performance management, programmatic decision making and ensure student success.
Years ago, in higher education, one of the biggest challenges was getting data that could be used to assess faculty performance, programmatic performance and other useful information for decision-making. Today, it seems as if data is now in abundance and deciding how to best use the data is the biggest challenge. While universities have successfully relied on institutional research to help inform planning, policy and decision making, in many cases, this data is at a higher-level. For administrators and leaders of programs, it is necessary to be able to drill into the data for further analysis to support programmatic decision-making.
This decision-making could be related to the program, a course, or faculty member with the key goal of supporting student success. Therefore, it is important to know where to obtain the data and how to best use the data. For instance, in an online classroom, data from the LMS can inform users of instructional quality. In a traditional classroom, student reviews can help to inform users of instructional quality. Other data might include grade distribution, tuition waivers, retention, and peer reviews.
End of course survey data can inform users of how students rate an instructor. While end of course survey data can contain bias, by reviewing trends in survey data, users can determine if there is need for faculty development, course revision or other opportunities for student success. By not only looking at an overall analysis of the survey, breaking the survey down into sections and comparing to others who facilitate the same courses, can provide insight into “who does it well” and who might need faculty performance assistance. This data can also inform decision-makers on those faculty who consistently seem to “get it right” with students and may provide an opportunity to tap those faculty members for mentoring, guidance, development of best practices and other materials.
End of course survey data is not the only data that can be used to inform decision-making. Using data from the LMS system can inform online classroom performance by tracking days logged in and days posted. While the quantitative data does not always tell the best story, it is a way to gain insight as a springboard into faculty activity. Comparing data by course, by faculty or by program can give leadership a look at faculty member involvement.
The above examples are only two examples of data that can be used to create dashboards and many universities have created or are beginning to create dashboards for this type of data. However, while dashboards seem to be more commonplace than in the past, ensuring that dashboards are telling the right story can be a challenge. Without trends and detailed insight, the story could be misleading. In some cases, the designers of the dashboards only provide a high-level insight without knowing the right questions to ask. Therefore, it is important that all the key stakeholders provide insight into answering questions that provide the best answer. Creating dashboards that tell the right story, is key to creating the appropriate metrics and insight into performance.
The session targets academic leadership, program leadership, and faculty support staff who may be interested in viewing specific dashboards that help to answer the right questions. Many dashboard examples will be provided including Tableau and PowerBI to demonstrate how one university has worked with academic leadership to answer the right questions. The session’s learning outcomes will be to provide an overview of using dashboards to answer the right questions when evaluating data for decision-making.
Participants will engage in the session through interactive questions and answers regarding dashboards.