Students, families, colleges, and lawmakers need clearer information on postsecondary outcomes to make informed decisions. By leveraging data available at institutions and federal agencies, a nationwide student-level data network (SLDN) would close information gaps that persist in our higher education landscape to answer critical questions about…

There is steadily growing consensus around a critical issue in our nation's higher education system: the need to modernize our postsecondary data infrastructure. Recognizing that building the Student-Level Data Network (SLDN) outlined in pending federal legislation will require the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to make key…

The launch of HealthCare.gov, the website of the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare), was a major public relations disaster for the Obama administration. This case examines some of the factors that contributed to the failure of the launch and then details how Optum, an information technology service provider, considered the opportunity provided by…

In this paper the authors describe a novel "Virtual Research Environment" (VRE) based on the Sakai Virtual Collaboration Environment and designed to support education research. This VRE has been used for the past two years by projects of the UK Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme, 10 of which…