Speculative reform jumps the gun on notions of data-driven reform, requiring administrators to anticipate and act to ensure problems (and the data that would show them) do not materialize. Speculative reforms are incapable of delivering the outcomes they promise, as they are fueled by a fear of the future that their reforms do not extinguish. In…

Traditional student information systems were designed primarily to collect and manage records of course enrollment and credit hours earned, as well as other data elements needed to monitor each student's progress to graduation. Now, institutions want to monitor and improve the quality and equity of students' learning experiences in courses and the…

Student privacy is a critical area of higher education that deserves greater focus, particularly as student data digitalization increases. Many colleges and universities use data literacy as a way to prepare students, sometimes from different disciplines, to work with others' data postgraduation. Data literacy can be an avenue for helping all…

Meaningful change towards antiracist practices take time. There are no quick fixes. Quick workshops on implicit bias and microaggressions rarely lead to lasting changes in teaching practices. Equity QUantified In Participation (EQUIP) learning communities organize faculty members to work together to promote antiracist teaching. Equity analytics…

A "Cone of Uncertainty" has become ubiquitous in hurricane forecasting, encompassing the likeliest possible path that a storm might take as it approaches landfall. These forecasts are crucial because they help government agencies at all levels prepare even in these far-from-certain future conditions. Although individual institutions have…

Complete College America (CCA) is partnered with the National Student Clearinghouse in promoting the latter's Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP), a data and reporting tool for tracking student success metrics. The PDP is offered at nominal cost, built for democratized data access, and encompasses transfer data native to Clearinghouse products,…

Curriculum maps have long served as useful guides in the careful design of a curriculum's pedagogical aims and where they are to be achieved, however such a map cannot indicate how students are actually moving through the curriculum. This article discusses traffic models. When employed in the study of courses drawn from multiple departments,…

Data and technology can be used for achieving many different objectives, and their applications should be driven by major stakeholder needs. Already there are emerging projects and innovations that will lay the foundation for a new public-private data infrastructure to produce a more dynamic and equitable talent marketplace. The launch of the T3…

In this article, the authors report on a tested workload intervention, faculty work activity dashboards, to enhance transparency and reduce ambiguity. This intervention is part of the Faculty Workload and Rewards Project (FWRP), a National Science Foundation-funded, action-research project designed to improve equity in how faculty workload is…