Tech savvy institutions rely on data to drive decision making and student outcomes, by gathering qualitative and quantitative information from multiple sources and touch points across the student journey. From the admissions process, through program enrollment, and beyond into Alumni status, education seeks to continuously analyze a wealth of information in numerous interconnected ways to identify trends and patterns that become the launch point for initiatives that ultimately are aimed at driving growth. A strong commitment to leveraging all available student data is needed to guide decision-making in order to improve outcomes, streamline processes, and aid in student learning. Technology is integral to eliminating barriers to a data-driven culture and establishing processes that offer governed access to administration and staff users in a self-service environment that doesn’t require the support of a consultant or highly technical individual.
Building and maintaining a strong data-driven culture often starts with providing the right tools that are easily accessible to all levels of the institution. It is essential for leaders to consider buy-in from colleagues to get to a point where all staff members agree that data is crucial to achieving the organizational objectives AND can be a helpful on-demand asset, not a burden.
Data is constantly evolving! Keeping students and faculty up to date with real-time grades, assessments, and attendance is mandatory in order to ensure timely modification to instruction, support, and intervention via communications. For students, and guardians of minors, a delay of 24 hours can cause confusion, leading to unnecessary inquiries for school faculty/staff, resulting in hours of redundant support communications that could have easily been avoided by having a student/guardian portal with access to real-time data.
Additionally, it is far more difficult to move forward in subject area lessons when a student is not immediately alerted when they are falling behind.
It should not be necessary for educators to spend valuable time creating and using spreadsheets. They should not have to visit three or four different platforms to review the data. They would be exponentially more effective implementing procedures that eliminate anything that stands in the way of them doing what they do best.
Centralizing data in one system, either by using an “all-in-one solution” or using integrations to connect all the moving pieces, creates the opportunity to centralize data access and control with a data governance framework. Robust data access policies facilitate self-service analysis, so faculty/staff with permission can easily access the data they need, without the headaches or delays created when IT personnel are needed to serve as gatekeepers.
With an established governance framework via your student information system, organizations can define role-based access and provide both educators and staff across various department roles meaningful access to the data they need to make informed decisions for their functional area.
Data silos impede cooperation, hamper insights, and impair productivity. They occur naturally over time, mirroring organizational structures. As each department collects and stores its own data for its own purposes, it creates its own data silo. Varying tech tools & data management systems used by many organizations ends up pushing them into data silos. Different departments tend to support their operations using different technology solutions and tools, such as spreadsheets, accounting software, or a CRM like Salesforce. Most legacy systems were not designed to easily share information. Each solution stores and manages data in different ways — these are often proprietary to the vendor that created the solution, which makes it hard to share data sets with stakeholders in another department. Additionally, too many educational institutions are still using BI (Business Intelligence) software and other out-of-date data storage methods, forcing a time-consuming and ineffective search for data.
In the realm of educational data management, the best way to bust silos is to pool all student data into a cloud-based central data repository optimized for efficient analysis. Access can be easily granted to individuals or groups to balance business needs against privacy and security. Centralizing data in the cloud can solidify regulatory compliance, data governance, data security, and help eliminate silos making interdepartmental access to data easy & instantaneous.
