One of the challenges we had we had just
completed a system conversion of our student information,
our human resources information and our financial information
systems.
We did not have a good way to the reporting
at that point or to provide information to people
throughout our campus.
And so SAS really was the tool that we chose, in addition
to the great visuals, just to simply
be able to pull data from our system,
combine it, create our files, create all the background
snapshots that we needed to be able to do reporting
and to provide visuals for our campus.
You can do things that’s public-facing.
You can do things that are internal.
You can do things that are security-based.
So there’s all different levels of reporting that you can make
available through the SAS Visual Analytics tool.
And then again the ability to connect to various systems
across campus.
I mentioned that a lot but that’s a big deal for us
because it has given us so much more data than we have ever had
before.
And some data that we had never had access before.
And so I think the complete suite of tools and again within
the Visual Analytics there’s now Visual Statistics which allows
you to do the analytics part and the predictive modeling part
which again will be kind our next step down the road.
In addition to the fabulous visuals that we can now create
again, Enterprise Guide allows us to pull data,
to organize data, there’s data management tools and then
the ability to connect with various other systems across
campus.
Higher Ed is notorious for different offices
having different side systems.
And the ability for us to connect to all of those systems
and bring their data in to combine with ours has given us
more information more data than we have ever had access to.
And it’s allowing us to do different types of reporting
and visuals for our end users.
We’re able to get things out to people quicker.
We have a student profiler a factbook.
Every higher Ed institution has that type
of document or publication.
It used to be that we would get our data clean after drop
and add ended.
We would have programs we’d run then we’d take the data from
the programs and dump it into spreadsheets and then have
to make PDFs and then finally about a month and a half later
we had “a student profile”.
Now drop and add-ins, we finalize our dataset,
we drop it into Visual Analytics and we
have our student profile.
A week, you know, a week after drop and add-in’s.
So three weeks into the semester and it’s done.
And people have that information available.
It’s a hard thing to track how every room is utilized
throughout campus and we used to provide some reports.
They were very tedious.
It took somebody numerous months because they were hand
entering information about the time slots
that rooms were scheduled.
And so we actually collaborated.
We have a wonderful Master’s in Business Analytics Program.
We have since we’ve implemented SAS been hiring their students
as graduate research assistants.
And the first young lady that we hired came in
and she put together a classroom utilization dashboard.
So we can now look across every building on campus and look
and see what the percentage of times rooms
are utilized from 8:30 to 4:30 which are peak class times.
And then within that the percentage of seats
that are used within those classes.
So we know that only if a room is
being used a large percentage of the time
but if the number of students in the class is actually optimal.
And so that’s been a great way to look at our classrooms
across the campus and know whether we need more space,
are there certain size rooms we need?
Are there rooms that we’re not utilizing?
And so are there perhaps buildings where we have rooms
that aren’t well utilized but we could make them one larger room
that would be utilized?
So looking at renovating instead of building
a whole new building.
So it’s been a really good problem-solving tool as we have
been looking at the classroom utilization across campus.
Of course, the classroom utilization
that was not something we could have
done other than using SAS Viya.
It gives you the ability to drill down.
It gives you the ability for us look at different time periods
during the day.
It gives you the ability to look at different room sizes.
And so it gives us that specificity
to be able to drill down and get to very
granular levels of the data.
The visuals are just fantastic because there
are things you can show people in a visual that
resonates so much more than me saying something.
So, for instance, we typically say,
of the students that don’t graduate we lose half of them
in their first year.
Well, we have a path analysis of retention, enrollment
and retention and graduation rates
that now shows we lose 800 students their first year,
and in years 2, 3 4, 5 6, 600.
So, seeing those numbers is a much more striking comparison
to people than me saying here’s what happens.
The other thing we uncovered from that in looking at it
is, of the students that come back for that second year they
have an 80% graduation rate.
So, the emphasis we put on first-year retention
is well placed because getting those students back
their second year increases the probability of them graduating
significantly.
And we have retention dashboards that you can really slice
and dice in so many ways: gender,
ethnicity, first-generation, pell grant vs. non-pell grant,
by ACT score, by college.
And so, as to different people across campus look at this,
they identify different things that they go,
hey we saw this and we think… Here’s something we wanna look
at in terms of predictive modeling for what might
identify students who might be a risk coming in.
So that’s been a great thing.
And one of the things that we looked at that we were-
I was having a meeting with our faculty console and they said
in advance they said, you know we’re interested in looking
at how students who take classes online their first semester do.
And with very little effort we were able to add,
we had course information, we were
able to add that has an option in our retention dashboard.
So that I could go to a meeting and say,
here’s how they’re retention changes and here’s how
their GPAs differ based on whether they’re taking online
classes their first semester or not.
And so it makes it very easy to go from one thing to the next
question that follows up and be able to adjust to answer
numerous questions that we haven’t really ever been able
to answer before.
First of all, when we initially rolled out our dashboards
I actually met with our President, Provost
and our Senior Vice President for administration finance
to give them their own little tutorial so they immediately
knew what we had available.
I always for the Vice President, the Senior Vice President I
report to, I constantly keep him in the loop,
let him know about feedback we’re receiving from people.
Let him know how we’re utilizing the dashboards.
And it was a great thing that just happened recently.
We had at Oklahoma State University,
we had a Retention Conference which
was an internal conference.
It’s the first one we’ve ever had.
It had about 250 to 300 people across our campus that signed
up to attend the conference.
And I actually got to give the keynote
and talk about our retention dashboards
because we had just rolled them out.
And so it was a great way to share
what we were doing with not just the executive administration
but other Deans and Vice Presidents
and department heads across campus.
Our campus was really hungry for this type of reporting tool
and this type of report development and visuals
and interactivity and dynamic reporting that we’ve been able
to provide.
I think that we are working with our campus.
We’ve provided training for people that want to come
and learn to use the dashboards.
Because what we really want is to make sure people are
comfortable and are utilizing and understand how to utilize
the dashboards, understand how to obtain benefit from
the information we’re providing.
Executives are, they have been using it as well.
And so some of the things we have tried to do for them
is to make higher-level dashboards
that they have access to that they
know where to look for these because it gives them
the big-picture data.
We are really fortunate, our president, our senior vice
presidents they are enormously in tune with data
and wanting information and wanting to make decisions
that are informed by data.
We’ve been really fortunate having the support from
our executive administration.
I think the culture of analytics,
in higher Ed everything again is happening so much faster.
We’ve got to be able to react more quickly when we see
changes.
We can’t take months to do some sort of study to come up with
what should be happening.
We’ve got to be able to have a dataset that we can start
looking at things and say hey here’s what we’ve seen.
Much more quickly and respond to it
and be able to proactively respond instead of reacting
several months down the road.
We have someone in our office who
has built probably 85% of our visuals
and he was not someone who had programming expertise.
We implemented the SAS tools and he just jumped on it
and learned it and he’s fantastic at it.
Because he- even without being a programmer-
he’s got this level of creativity that really serves
us when thinking about the best visual for the best report
and what works the best, what’s the most benefit.
We were able to have our student profile probably 80%
of our profile out on our website
within a week of going live.
That was a lot of time spent prior to going live so that we
could have those things ready.
But I consider that to be a great success.
I consider just the sheer volume of the dashboards that we’ve
been able to develop this year to be a success for us.
And that was really our first-year goal
was to make data, make information more
available to our end-users and to give them information
was much more flexible and dynamic in how
that it can be used.
And so that’s that stage one of our success.
Another stage of that again is helping the campus
become accustomed to that.
And I think we have been successful in that.
I think we certainly have in addition to our executive team
we have the advocates across campus
that are very data-informed individuals.
And so they advocate for this as well.
And then I think our next stage of success
again is looking at OK we have all of this information.
We have the data.
What’s the information?
There’s that kind of cliché of we’re drowning in data
and starving for information.
We’re now at the point where we want to start looking at what
all- what is all this telling us and how can we benefit?
What benefit can this provide to our campus
once we start looking at some of these relationships?
What I think is happening for us is it’s changing
the conversations.
It’s no longer a, can you give us these numbers?
It’s we have these numbers and here’s what we see and here’s
what we’d like to look at.
How does this number affecting this other number over here?
Or how are these combinations working together to help or not
help the student?
And so I think it’s changing the way we have conversations
and we’re looking more towards analytics and how we do
modeling now based on the numbers we see instead of just
looking at all the different types of numbers and categories
of numbers.
The information we have been able to provide again
has been game-changers across our campus.
We hear time and time again, we never knew this.
That data- we now see this in the data
or we always thought this and now we know the data
tells us something different.
And so being able to give all that our campus
and our end-users and know that we
have these partnerships across campus where our goal is now
to take this and move our campus forward and see how we can make
things better is just a great thing and a wonderful time
to be working at OSU for me.
Academic ledgers are something that we’ve had for years
and years and years.
And they were a stagnant PDF that
had five years of data that had student data, faculty
information, research expenditures,
and financial information.
And we had them from the department up to the college
up to the university level.
It’s how our colleges when they come in and have budget talks
with our Senior Vice Presidents that they come in and they have
this information with them.
We’ve now completely rebuilt those as a dashboard.
And so now a Dean of a college or even a department
head or even the President can get into any of these.
They’re on our public dashboard.
So actually anybody can get into them.
And you can drill down and you can
see how has the student enrollment changed
over five years?
How has the faculty counts for tenure track
vs. non-tenure track changed over five years?
What about the research expenditures?
You know how much external funding
are colleges, different colleges and departments bringing in?
And so people have been thrilled to see those now developed
as a dashboard that’s much more interactive.
One of the things that we talked about was the fact that we’ve
been able to collect information and connect with so many
different sources across campus to get additional information
that we have never had before.
One of those is our Student Affairs have a database where
they’ve tracked card swipes.
So as students go to different activities across campus
they can track what students are involved in.
So being able to identify some of those students that
might be at risk.
So again with the example using swipe card information
from students and looking at the engagement
if you see a student who their activity has- their patterns
have shifted.
That can be a red flag if they have never-
if they’ve come in and they haven’t really been involved
in all.
That could be a red flag because it’s you know the research will
show that students feel- either feel connected or don’t
in their first 6 weeks of being on a campus.
And so if you see a student that comes in and they have no
activities at all that should be an immediate red flag that
someone needs to reach out to them whether it’s Residential
Life or the First Year Success office or their advisor and see
if we can get them involved.
So I think there is some of that, that
helps with student success.
But I think the more we get into the analytic side of it
and looking at now that what the retention data is telling us
and how we can better identify a student who
may come in and need some of the additional resources
that we offer will be a great thing for us.
We really want to expand this to include our Human Resource
reporting, our faculty, and staff reporting,
as well as our financial reporting.
We have started working with our-
what we call our HRIM, our Human Resources Information
Management, and our financial information management groups
to start working towards that goal.
And then in addition to that Oklahoma State University
we are under what we call the ANM Board of Regents.
So there are other institutions; Langston, Panhandle, NEO,
and Connors who are umbrellaed under that board but don’t have
the same types of resources that OSU has.
What we want to do is have- thru a shared service model
be able to provide those campuses some
of the standard reporting templates
and then standard visual templates
so that their administration can also benefit from this tool.