Welcome to Data Science and Student Success Technologies
Our Vision
Data Science and Student Success Technologies will be a creative force for good in higher education. We will accomplish this by answering important questions by combining our sophisticated integrated infrastructure for analytics and business intelligence, and digital transformation with the use of appropriate analytical techniques (regardless of its level of sophistication) to develop and communicate actionable insights into systems and tools so that they may be acted upon. We are successful when we help one, one hundred, or one thousand students reach their educational goals.
Our Mission
Under the leadership of the Associate Provost for Analytics and Institutional Assessment, the mission of Data Science and Student Success Technologies is to provide an integrated infrastructure for analytics and business intelligence, and digital transformation. Data Science and Student Success Technologies will –
– Advise the campus community on the effective use of data-gathering and institutional analytics to support strategic planning, continuous improvement, and institutional assessment
– Support evidence-based decision-making within academic affairs and will be responsible for the development of an integrated process and infrastructure for academic planning, assessment, and analytics consistent with the strategic objectives and priorities of the University’s strategic plan
– Support the deployment of new processes for periodic institutional assessment exercises, university accreditation, and continuous improvement, including the development of a transparent structure for the summary, documentation, and communication of institutional assessment efforts within academic affairs
– Support academic affairs units in evaluating and meeting their goals by facilitating the sharing of information from the University’s analytic and data systems, and guiding the development and deployment of new data and analytical resources for the benefit of the campus
– Participate in the re-envisioning of the student experience through a comprehensive analysis of the student journey from recruitment through graduation with targeted investments to redesign areas of greatest need and highest value
– Support recruitment, enrollment, retention, and persistence by leveraging predictive analytics and targeted, data-driven interventions along with information technology resources to scale those interventions
– Improve access to institutional data by investing in modern infrastructure, processes, and visualization that reduce barriers to finding, understanding, and using data and information
– Improve the velocity and accuracy of decisions by building analytical capability to interpret and act on institutional data
– Increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our workforce by redesigning processes, infusing new ways of working and collaborating into our practice and automating activities that do not directly enhance the student experience
Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) provides platforms and tools for analytics and assessment for UMBC; promoting insight, discovery, and intelligent action to support the vision and mission of the University. UMBC is seen as a national leader in the use of analytics (or “actionable intelligence”).
The Division of Information Technology (DoIT) provides the technical infrastructure and expertise for the official UMBC Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse supported and curated by Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRADS). We also partner with Finance, Enrollment Management, the Office of Undergraduate Education, all colleges and several departments to help turn data into insight.
Finally, DoIT has organized analytics training workshops for the campus, and co-sponsors (with IRADS) an informal REX Users Group that meets biweekly on Fridays at noon. For more information, please see rex.umbc.edu.