We're developing two new services: a supported professional development opportunity to develop skills in data and analytics, and a resulting suite of interactive dashboards.
What we're working on
Analytics Labs
Our Analytics Labs service is an expert mentoring and coaching programme, which will offer a unique continuing professional development (CPD) opportunity for higher education.
Participating staff will:
- Receive support in data manipulation and visualisation
- Gain an increased knowledge of the national data landscape
- Find out how to use data for enhanced strategic decision-making
...all in an educational setting.
How it works
Once our established stakeholder group (made up of leaders and practitioners from the higher education sector) have identified themes to explore, we acquire and use the relevant data to coach participants in creating a range of dashboards.
The most appropriate dashboards created by participants are first released to the sector in beta form. The best are selected before being developed fully into community dashboards (see below), which are designed to help with easy exploration and decision-making within the sector.
Outcomes
Analytics Labs participants gain experience in:
- Agile development methods and how to use these in your workplace
- Tableau: a leading edge data visualisation software
- Alteryx: an advanced data manipulation tool
- National data landscape and its relationship to enhancing higher education
Furthermore, you'll gain a wider understanding of data issues within the sector, while collaborating and building relationships with sector peers.
On successful completion, participants will also receive accreditation via a digital credential badge, which clearly evidences learned competencies.
Community dashboards
Following community feedback, a selection of the most promising community dashboards have been re-developed and made available for all UK higher education (HE) providers through HESA's Heidi Plus HE intelligence platform.
So far, our Analytics Labs teams have explored and recorded over 60 different data sources (including HESA). They can be explored using filters such as course, institution, gender, year, geographical area, feeder schools, age.
Find out how you can try out our community dashboards for free.
Example dashboard insights
- Higher education league tables - time series exploration of Guardian and Times league tables
- School finder - find the right areas and schools to target in order to increase recruitment onto your courses, tailored to your entry tariffs
- Leaver destinations - where students go after graduation, including areas of further study, institutions of further study, industries and employment status
- Comparable providers - see how your institution compares against your competitors, and find your closest comparator according to 13 common measures
- Business and community interaction – compare the amount of income you generate with other institutions in areas including collaborative research, commercialisation of intellectual property (IP) and community and cultural engagement
- Postgraduate research analysis – find out how many postgraduate researchers you have and how they are funded, comparing against other institutions and showing growth and decline over time
- Athena Swan and race equality - how do you stand up against compliance with race equality charter across my workforce compared to other institutions
Benefits
Our business intelligence services will of benefit to the majority of departments in HE, including planners, human resources and finance. Benefits include:
- Upskilling in data and analytics
- Benchmarking against competitor institutions
- Accessing and analysing national data for educational purposes from over 60 sources (including the Department for Education, gov.uk, Office for National Statistics, HEFCE, UCAS) on areas such as destination of leavers, widening participation, student retention, research
- Improving student recruitment, retention, staffing, research, estates and league table standing
- Influencing future developments
Find out more
To stay up to date, sign up to our JiscMail mailing list, check out our business intelligence blog, or email us to contact the project team directly.
View higher education data for free
Try out our community dashboards for free until 31 July 2018.
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