States serve as the central authority in higher education oversight, playing a critical role in consumer protection and quality assurance within the regulatory triad and as an independent regulatory entity. However, there is a notable gap in understanding the components of renewal processes, how agencies implement them in practice, and the…

Higher education has faced increased pressure to prove its quality through 'economic efficiency' and 'value for money', thrusting institutions into what researchers call an 'audit culture'. This study explores whether and how the audit culture has impacted educational developers in Canadian post-secondary institutions. Results include a summary of…

Contemporary research on preservice teachers' data use opportunities, coursework, and interventions typically focuses on preservice teachers' perceptions about data use comfort, confidence, and preparedness. Despite the contribution of such research to understanding the efficacy of approaches to teacher preparation, understanding preservice…

The rapid recent use of learning analytics (LA) in higher education, specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic, allows the monitoring of users' behavior while learning. Using LA may promote students' learning outcomes but also intrude into their privacy. This study aimed to explore students' behaviour and perceptions towards privacy and data…

State agencies rely on the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as an essential part of their postsecondary education data systems. The system provides common definitions and standardized indicators that enable consistent measurement across institutions and states, enabling institutional and state comparisons, accountability…

This book offers concrete examples of how data can be used by faculty, staff, and program leaders to improve their collective work as teacher educators. Strong external accountability mandates often lead to tensions that undermine local morale and motivation. This volume focuses on the practical work of navigating these tensions so that valuable…

This book examines the idea of educational accountability in higher education, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make colleges better? What if educational accountability tools don't actually measure what they're supposed to? What if accountability data isn't valid, or worse, what if it's meaningless?…

Online program managers (OPMs) are third-party companies that work with colleges and universities to develop, launch, and deliver online learning. Despite the prevalence of these companies in higher education, cost details are often buried or asserted with legal protections as trade secrets or business models unavailable for public review.3…

Procrastination is a prevalent issue among university students and leads to long-term negative impacts on academic performance as well as mental health and quality of life. This paper investigated StudyTracker, a self-tracking digital application (app) that we developed for university students to use to track their study sessions. The app provided…

The U.S. Department of Education has required educational collection and reporting. For postsecondary institutions, this requirement has evolved from the Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS), which was used from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the Integrated postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) (Aliyeva, Cody, & Low, 2018).…

This case study identifies college outcomes data transparency and accountability beliefs held by policy-makers, higher education associations, advocacy groups, think tanks, and other actors in the federal higher education policy domain, as well as how these beliefs have changed since the last reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 2008.…

The Partnership for College Completion (PCC) was founded to "advance equity in higher education" by supporting colleges and universities to improve college completion for Black, Latinx, and Pell-eligible students--those groups that experience persistent disparities in completion. Simultaneously, PCC engages in state policy reform to…

This article presents the findings of a systematic qualitative analysis of research in the ethics of digital trace data use in learning and education. From the resulting analysis of 77 peer-reviewed studies, we (1) map the characteristics of research by study type, academic community, institutional setting, and national context; (2) identify the…

The emergence of personalised data technologies such as learning analytics is framed as a solution to manage the needs of higher education student populations that are growing ever more diverse and larger in size. However, the current approach to learning analytics presents tensions between increasing student agency in making learning-related…

We explore institutional change and organizational learning in higher education in the context of a large-scale reform of developmental education in Florida. We use statewide survey data to examine administrators' perceptions of the use and effectiveness of accountability metrics, methods to identify solutions to improve student outcomes, and…