Cal Assessment Network (CAN) hosts Cal Answers

December 8, 2014

Exploring the Landscape:  What's New and Upcoming for Cal Answers

On Friday, December 5th, at the Cal Assessment Network's (CAN) monthly meeting, representatives from Cal Answers and CalPlanning  demonstrated the new curriculum dashboard and talked about new instructional videos that were developed to help users navigate the Cal Answers system.

Cal Answers makes data accessible to all, enabling staff, faculty, and students to locate reliable, consistent answers to critical campus questions.

Future plans, including BAIRS integration into Cal Answers and new Smart View functionality were also featured.

The Presenters were:
  • Amber Machamer - Executive Director, Office of Planning and Analysis
  • Cathy Lloyd - Executive Director, Strategic Program Management
  • Andy Zirman - CalPlanning Functional Lead, Strategic Program Management
  • Jenna Allen - Institutional Research Analyst, Office of Planning and Analysis
  • Mehmet Sevinc - Cal Answers Functional Lead, Strategic Program Management
Highlights of the presentation:
Introduction of the Cal Answers teams
What's Coming Up?
  • Cal Answers Financials/BAIRS Retirement project 
  • CalPlanning daily actuals 
  • How to use SmartView to combine data from CalPlanning and Cal Answers
The session was open to the campus community and provided those in attendance an opportunity to ask questions directly from the campus experts on the process of using centralized, integrated information pulled from various campus systems to inform decision making.
Reports included in the Departmental Teaching Workload Dashboard. are:
  • Teaching by Credited Department
  • Course & Instructor Detail for the Credited Department
  • Room Share and Crosslisted Course detail

Also discussed was the BAIRS Transition to Cal Answers.

Beginning February 2, 2015, actuals financial data from the EDW (BAIRS) will be loaded to CalPlanning daily.

This means: 

  • Up-to-date financial reporting including comparisons of budget/forecast to actuals
  • Increased utility of CalPlanning
  • Supports more users in CalPlanning rather than BAIRS
  • Supports longer term strategy goals
Links:
Cal Answers Videos: http://calanswers.berkeley.edu/training
CalPlanning Videos: http://budget.berkeley.edu/systems/calplanning/training