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Discovery to delivery: the University of Suffolk’s data quality journey with attendance monitoring

Data quality was a vital requirement when implementing attendance monitoring at the University of Suffolk and along the way they uncovered a wealth of benefits for their students and staff.

When the University of Suffolk decided to implement learning analytics at their Ipswich campus, they were prepared for the technical element, but they also used attendance monitoring to tackle data quality.

The team’s work is already reaping the benefits for the 3000 students and nearly 500 staff at the Ipswich campus.

Ian Harries, student records system manager, summed up the technical workload, while acknowledging it isn’t always as ‘simple’ as it sounded:

“The main challenge was the data formats and the structure of those data feeds… making sure that we were picking up from student record system and serving it in an appropriate data format.”

The team worked to align their data dictionary and documentation, and as Ian noted, that work is ongoing. The work has also highlighted issues they were aware of or suspected. These are now captured to resolve in their future plans.

Simon Lavis, educational developer (learning data and automation), sees this as a positive:

“The work has provided a check list of things that we need to look at and a renewed focus, so it’s been a worthwhile exercise.”

Mary Cornelius, head of educational development and innovation at Suffolk, also noted the bigger picture benefit of aligning roles and permissions for colleagues across the organisation. One of the benefits was that colleagues in Suffolk’s learning management system could see the same data in attendance monitoring. This has created an infrastructure to build on and saved future redesign and redevelopment work.

A transformation project should not exist in isolation from the people and the departments it serves. As Mary commented:

“It's just been amazing to see everyone being really persistent and collaboratively working across departments.”

The team are in discussion with their registrar on applying the roles and permission work across the organisation:

“[Attendance monitoring] has really given us an opportunity to re-evaluate people's access and get better alignment between departments who look after different systems. So that's been really positive.”

Targeted support and community

A core offering of our learning analytics platform is our targeted support and the learning analytics community. The team were full of praise for the detailed documentation for ‘non-techy’ people alongside the on-the-ground support:

“It’s really great to have somebody who understands the complexity and the difficulty of the entire project.”

The learning analytics community and monthly drop-in sessions also helped the Suffolk team to demystify issues and work out their next steps. Simon said:

“Knowing how colleagues were handling interventions with students, and that some of the difficulties with data prep were not unique to us, was helpful just to validate that it wasn't anything wrong with our processes.”

Suffolk saw immediate benefits from standardised, high-quality data:

“Already students are getting accurate attendance data. Data analysts within our Directorate have collaborated to build some incredible business intelligence dashboards. These give people exactly the information they need to do their job, all because we've got great attendance data.”

Better information has improved the processes and communications for students in their first year of study.

Simon said:

“We've made some modifications to how we apply automated emails in different stages for differing lengths of time below a target threshold. This reduces burden on the academic staff. The protocol is very mature now, and we couldn't have done that without the quality of data that we're getting out.”

The team agree this is the start of their journey with attendance monitoring, and only the beginning of what they can do. As Simon added:

“Attendance is just one facet of engagement, and that's really what we're measuring. It is part of a broader set of criteria when looking at student success and how we can support students who might be either at risk or on a trend in that direction so we can intervene a little sooner.”

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