By Michelle Mott, AACRAO Associate Director of Government Relations and Communications
Presenters Doug McKenna, University Registrar, George Mason University and Ingrid Nuttall, Director, Office of the Registrar, University of Minnesota
Registrar's Offices provide significant operational support in reporting, but our analytics capabilities remain nascent. Doug McKenna and Ingrid Nuttall discuss the nuances of establishing a framework for institutional analytics maturity to inform decision-making.
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Understanding current policies and practices are essential to understanding what your institution or individual office can do to support broader analytics efforts.
EDUCAUSE developed maturity and deployment indices to measure and benchmark analytics practices to help institutions better understand their progress with analytics in higher education. The indices examine multiple dimensions of progress (not just technical ones) such as decision-making culture, data efficacy, policies, investment/resources, technical infrastructure, and institutional research involvement. Using a scale from 1-5 measuring from absent/ad hoc to optimized, institutions can determine where they are and where they desire to be on the path toward analytics maturity.
The live-streaming session included interactive polls to gauge how in-person and virtual participants ranked their current levels of analytics development. Doing so can help institutions and individual offices identify areas of strength and weakness to work toward advancing their analytics strategic planning and management. McKenna, host of the For the Record podcast, will feature those results in an upcoming episode following the meeting, digging further into the role the registrar can and should play in supporting analytics efforts.
What does data governance mean to your institution?
In many cases, institutions have reporting and analytics before there is an established data governance framework. In those cases, there can be risks and student impacts when there are no data definitions to set how that information will be used. And while creating that framework is a significant investment, the task is not insurmountable. Nuttall shared practical examples of how the University of Minnesota is working to move the needle on its analytics capabilities and how the Registrar’s Office can support that work, particularly focusing on impacts to degree audit, scheduling, and diversity/equity/inclusion initiatives.
The presenters offered a set of questions that can help institutions gauge how they are handling data governance:
How are decisions made about who gets to see/use data?
What is the data philosophy? Share everything?
Do you have formal or informal data governance?
Are you able to proactively decide how you can support the institution with the data you are responsible for? (and understand how people are using that data)
Is your institution using operational reporting for analytics purposes?
The presenters also laid out several key considerations for institutions:
Challenges of multi-campus institutions
Interesting vs. useful data
Data literacy
Operational and descriptive data
Change in direction can affect your trajectory
Stay up-to-date on the roles, responsibilities, and challenges of the Registrar's Office by listening to the AACRAO podcast For the Record.