Skip to main content

Use of student data: dashboards

The University's Student Systems team have built a prototype dashboard for our academic schools, to display information about students on the schools' programmes and courses.  The prototype has several tabs, presenting information about applications for programmes, completion results, survey results, demographics, and assessment.  The team consulted with other universities about what works for them, took the best results we found and applied that experience to the needs of our University.

The next stage is to turn this into a robust service and this where the architecture team have a role.  We are currently working to define an architecture for the university's BI/MI data, both at the technology level (e.g. a data warehouse) and at the modelling level.  Much of the data used in the prototype has been scraped together using a combination of existing data marts and Excel, with significant effort needed to write complex reports across these multiple sources.  That is fine for a prototype but needs refinement for a production service.
The architecture team are working with the Student Systems team to define a roadmap for the BI data that underlies the dashboards.  There are some immediate tasks that the dashboard designer has already identified, such as standardising certain values in order to simplify table joins, and building BI universes for the data that is currently in Excel.  Moving beyond this, we are defining a target architecture based on a single data mart that will incorporate all the necessary data and be more flexible than the existing database.  Business logic will be moved from the BI universes into the data mart, reducing the complexity of the presentation layer and opening the way for adopting different dashboard tools.

In the long term, it would be desirable to link to data from other systems.  For example, a school may wish to know the current cost of a course, including data about the costs of the space and other resources used.  This cross-unit reporting is a particular focus of our wider BI architecture work, which I'll write about later.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Webinar: Powering your business with Cloud Computing

On October 14th, I will be hosting a Grid Computing Now! web seminar on the topic of Cloud Computing. We have lined up two very interesting speakers who are using Cloud now to make businesses work. Ross Cooney had a good technological solution to sell but couldn't make it economic until Cloud Computing allowed him to pay for his computation only when he needed it. He will discuss the instant benefits and long term impact of cloud computing to the development, competitiveness and scalability of your application. Alan Williamson created the BlueDragon Java CFML runtime engine that powers MySpace.com. He advises several businesses and will give an overview of the different types of services available and how to avoid being locked-in to a single supplier. You can register for this event here .
Post a Comment
Read more

Business Model Canvas

A Business Model Canvas is a tool for mapping the core functions and capabilities of an organisation.  Compared to the Core Diagrams that I described in an earlier post , the business model canvas attempts to present more aspects of the business, starting with the value proposition – a statement of what the organisation offers to its users (in the business world, to its customers).  It shows the activities and resources, as Core Diagrams do, but also shows user relationships & channels, and also benefits and costs.  I’m not aware of any universities that have used this tool but you can find examples from elsewhere on the web. We are considering business model canvases as a tool for mapping the strategic capabilities of units at the University of Edinburgh.  Phil Taylor, our EA contractor, sketched an outline of what a business model canvas might begin to look like for HR: This is only intended to be suggestive: the real canvas would need to result from in-de...
2 comments
Read more

Changing Principles

In EA, architecture principles set a framework for making architectural decisions.  They help to establish a common understanding across different groups of stakeholders, and provide guidance for portfolios and projects.  Michael Durso of the LSE gave a good introduction to the idea in a webinar last week for the UCISA EA community. Many organisations take the TOGAF architecture principles as a starting point.  These are based on the four architectural domains of TOGAF: business, information/data, applications, technology/infrastructure.  These principles tend to describe what should be done, e.g. re-use applications, buy in software rather than build it, keep data secure.  See for example the principles adopted at Plymouth University and the University of Birmingham . Recently though, I encountered a different way of looking at principles.  The user experience design community tend to focus more on how we should do things.  E.g. we should...
1 comment
Read more