Data Spotlight:
Over this past year, Cal Answers released some great new dashboards, including:
Student Demographics and Outcomes At a Glance
This dashboard integrates key academic indicators from the Student Demographics and Outcomes dashboards, including: top 5 majors for undergraduate and graduate students, number of degree recipients by level, and undergraduate graduation rates.
Departmental Curriculum Profile
This dashboard integrates data from across the suite of existing curriculum dashboards, making it easy to view curriculum-related metrics tailored to each academic unit. Intended for use by Deans, Department Chairs, and the staff members who support them, this dashboard aids departments with curriculum management as well as academic planning. It indicates class demand, highlights changes in course enrollments, and identifies the types of instructors the unit has used to mount the curriculum and their respective share of the teaching load. The dashboard design emphasizes data visualization to quickly draw attention to trends and anomalies.
Teaching Activity
This dashboard displays teaching activity data by course-listing unit (i.e., the unit that lists the course in the Schedule of Classes). The key metrics are course enrollment count and Student Credit Hours (SCH); these metrics are broken down by instructor type, indicating how many enrollments and SCH were taught by each instructor category (e.g., ladder faculty, lecturers, graduate student instructors). It also provides a list of all instructors who have taught a specific course and all of the courses taught by individual instructors. The dashboard answers questions such as: What percentage of enrollments in a given department were taught by ladder faculty compared to lecturers? What are the names and job titles of the instructors who taught a specific class over the past five years? Which courses, in all departments, have been taught by an individual instructor?
Departmental Teaching Workload
This dashboard is similar to Teaching Activity, but it displays data by credited department rather than course-listing unit. The credited department is typically the unit that paid the instructor. The data in the dashboard reflects all of the teaching activity credited to the unit, regardless of the department offering the course. In the case of cross-listed classes, this dashboard provides the total count of enrollments and SCH in all of the class sections that comprise the cross-list bundle and that were credited to the unit. The data can be viewed either by instructor type or as a list of all courses credited to the department. Finally, for cross-listed courses, it lists all of the sections from other departments and their corresponding enrollments and SCH.
Cal Answers at Summerfest and Stay Day:
The Cal Answers Team was out in force on June 10 at both Summerfest and Stay Day! We celebrated three of the Cal Answers student data Super Users: Susan Hagstrom (Director, Office of Undergraduate Advising, College of Environmental Design), Chelan Huddleston (Curriculum Analyst, College of Letters & Science), and Zoya Korshun (Sr. Financial Analyst, College of Engineering). Our Super Users shared success stories and advice for new users as well as how they use their favorite dashboards. Team members mingled with colleagues, shared information about the student subject areas, and answered questions about using Cal Answers.
Get to Know a Super User
Cal Answers "Super Users" are a growing community of experts who use and love Cal Answers and serve as resources to their units.
Interview with Susan Hagstrom | Director, Office of Undergraduate Advising, College of Environmental Design
How long have you been using Cal Answers?
I began with Cal Profiles and switched over to Cal Answers as soon as it was available.
Which subject areas within Cal Answers do you use?
Student Financials, Student Curriculum, Student Applicants, Student Demographics & Outcomes. I primarily use student demographics and financials because they are the most relevant to my job. From time to time I use the planning, curriculum, and applicant data.
What questions do you use Cal Answers to answer?
What does our student body look like in terms of admit type, ethnicity, percentage of international students, socio-economic status, etc., and how might these demographics shape the strengths and needs of our students? How might we best tailor our advising model to fit our unique student body? What are our enrollment trends over time and how do we compare to other colleges and the campus as a whole? With the academic planning data now available, we are beginning to use Cal Answers to predict course enrollment, which is a big help to our academic departments.
What is your favorite Cal Answers dashboard(s)?
Student demographics and outcomes - census
What is your favorite Cal Answers metric(s)?
Anything that helps us understand our student body better!
Do you have a Cal Answers success story to share?
I love the term "data activism" and see so much potential in Cal Answers to help us improve the student experience at Cal. See http://advisingmatters.berkeley.edu/data-activism for a story about how we created a fee waiver program for our students. We then used Cal Answers data to support our application for an Equity & Inclusion grant to create a Student Materials Store in CED. See http://diversity.berkeley.edu/2013-2014innovationgrantsprojects and http://ced.berkeley.edu/resources/materials-store/. Data was pivotal in making our case!
What advice do you have for anyone new to Cal Answers?
You don't need to be a data geek to successfully use Cal Answers. I am definitely not a statistics genius by any stretch of the imagination but the system is intuitive and easy to use - if I can use it, so can you! It's also important to remember that data is just one piece of the assessment puzzle. You can use Cal Answers data as a starting point for more qualitative modes of assessment. For example you can present some data to students and ask: "This is what the data suggests. Does this match your experience? What else do we need to know?"
Who on campus do you think would benefit from Cal Answers?
Anyone interested in improving the experience for Cal students. Anyone interested in using data to improve processes and policies. Those interested in being proactive about accommodating student demand on courses and majors.
Tips & Tricks!
Sharing a Dashboard View with a Colleague
A feature recently added to Cal Answers allows users to share direct links to dashboards. The link captures all of the filters applied to the dashboard (and any customizations made) and is very useful for circulating data prior to meetings or showing a colleague how to use a dashboard. See how to create a bookmark link.
Training Corner
Learn how to use Cal Answers by completing these "homework" assignments. Experienced users can test their knowledge by trying to answer questions of varying degrees of difficulty. Many other training resources, such as instructional videos and job aids, are available online.