Beyond informing human resources (HR) policies and practices, information gleaned from predictive analytics, visualized via dashboards, can increase awareness and prompt employee and management actions based on identified variables often related to intent to leave and employee wellness. While considerable research, relevant measurements, and tools…

The impetus for this article was an encounter with thousands of photographs in an online archive of a public university in New Zealand, taken over the twentieth century. The size of the archive and the paucity of information about many images draws attention to challenges of commencing work in a large institutional visual archive. The first part…

The federal government has collected data from colleges and universities for more than a century. However, how and what data are collected has evolved over time, as has the purposes for collecting those data. The most systematic collection of data happens through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is required to be…

Data analytics is undergoing an evolution through effective data use to support both operational and learning analytics models. However, this evolution will require that institutional leaders transform their data systems to best support the needs of application modeling and use their intuition to help drive the development of better analytical…

This teaching case addresses the design of a database that fulfills the complex requirements found at the Motion Picture Industry Pension Plan, an actual entity. With the goal of challenging students to think analytically and to apply information systems concepts and tools to real world situations, the case study was appropriately structured to…

This paper presents a description of the metadata harvester software development. This system provides access to reliable and quality educational resources, shared by Mexican Universities through their repositories, to anyone with Internet Access. We present the conceptual and contextual framework, followed by the technical basis, the results and…

There is an increasing requirement in higher education (HE) worldwide to deliver excellence. Benchmarking is widely used for this purpose, but methodological approaches to the creation of benchmark metrics vary greatly. Approaches require selection of factors for inclusion and subsequent calculation of benchmarks for comparison. We describe an…

Organizational affiliations of the creators of works are important to a variety of stakeholders, including academic administrators, funders, publishers, repository managers, software developers, rights agencies and individual researchers. Identifying and tracking these affiliations can be challenging, as organizations may be known by a variety of…

This chapter discusses common tools and resources for building a hybrid course in a higher education setting and provides recommendations for best practices in Learning Management Systems and Open Educational Resources.

The Purdue Polytechnic Institute was created two years ago from the former College of Technology. This was more than a name change; it represented a transformation which will have an impact not only the curriculum, but on learning, and teaching methods. Students need technical skills but they must also be able to collaborate, be problem solvers,…

For decades, academia has been hampered by what appears to be preference for opacity and obfuscation. In an article published in this magazine three years ago, "The Vocabularies of Higher Education" (Gaston, 2014), the author lamented the welter of terms and acronyms that has accumulated over many decades, particularly within the current…

The Educational Policy Institute released a new report today about the ability of state and national databases to meet the policy needs related to higher education affordability. Written by EPI Senior Research Associate Lee Holcombe, the report finds that although states are establishing ambitious higher education participation and success targets…

With over 37 million residents, California is the most populous state in the country. California's primary and secondary schools enroll over 6.2 million students,1 and there are 3.4 million undergraduates attending 683 postsecondary institutions in California. Yet, because of the lack of a strong data infrastructure, we are unable to answer basic…

This new ACT publication is an annual report offering meaningful research insights for some of the most pressing questions impacting admissions and enrollment practice. In the first release of this report, ACT research sheds light on the following topics: (1) the practice of super-scoring; (2) STEM major choice; (3) factors impacting retention and…

This commentary begins by summarizing the five contributions to this special issue and briefly recapping the background to the topic of student learning in higher education. Narrative and systematic reviews are compared, and the relative value of different bibliographic databases in the context of systematic reviews is assessed. The importance of…