Academic Insights: Assisting our academic administrators with timely, relevant data
Following the successful rollout of our Teaching Insights tool, we developed a tool for Academic Administrators that we called Academic Insights. This tool has pages for Courses, Majors, Scheduling, Graduates, Transfer, Wages, and Faculty.
My favorite parts of Academic Insights
What sections do I need to cancel?
This is our newest addition to this tool, and one I’m most excited about. Each semester, our academic administrators need to make the tough decisions about canceling sections. The closer this happens to the start of a semester, the bigger impact on students. In fact, we’ve found that about 6–7% of students withdraw completely from the college after a section they’ve registered for is canceled.
To assist with this decision-making in a timely manner, we are running a machine learning algorithm every day that predicts what the Day 1 registration counts will be for each section based on a combination of historical trends for that class, time of day, campus, modality, and more, and current registration trends.
In the future I’d like to add a red light, green light to this that uses this day 1 prediction but also takes into account institutional priorities such as allowing certain courses on a new campus that we are building enrollment at, or logic about carrying a section because it’s the only offering of that type. This would further assist the administrator in making the decision, and especially help newer administrators who might not be aware of all of the considerations they would need to take into account.
Do we have equity among all groups?
On each of the pages of this data product, the charts can be disaggregated by demographics such as gender, ethnicity, race, age, first generation, and degree seeking. This allows us to easily inspect for differences in certain groups as we work to improve the experience for all students at our college and right any inequities.
How are majors progressing in my program?
The Majors page shows some big numbers about enrollments. How many are applying? Currently enrolled? Applied for graduation this term?
Are students progressing or are there loss points?
What happens to students after taking this course?
Our academic administrators can view the outcomes of students the semester following their enrollment in a specific class. In other words, did this class help retain students, prepare them graduation, or is this class one where we lose students?
