Customer Story: College of Education

Overview

The College of Education wanted to more quickly and accurately track students as they progressed across more than 50 programs and pathways. Using the Enterprise Data Warehouse and Enterprise Web Services, it’s now just a couple of clicks. It’s visual, simple, and always accurate.

Customer Story Walk-through

Watch this short video to learn how the College of Education went from identifying challenges, setting priorities, and creating solutions using our services to achieve their goals.

Challenges

The College of Education has 1,500 graduate and undergraduate students, 70+ faculty,  and more than 50 distinct programs and pathways. Managing unique student data on locally stored computers via shared spreadsheets was a logistical challenge with no single source of truth. 

Solution

The College of Education developed a web-based Student Database application using UW’s Enterprise Data Warehouse and Enterprise Web Services to automate systems and easily deliver distinct student profiles to provide an accurate, up-to-date, customized experience for students and advisors.

Goals

• Create a single-source, multi-dimensional view of a College of Education student 
• Minimize locally stored data. 
• Achieve accurate state and federally mandated reporting

Outcomes

• Automatically put discovered students into cohort groups based on their first quarter of enrollment in a program.
• Sharable, user-friendly, filtered reports deliver simple, accurate, accessible, and customized information.
• Combine information in new ways to answer new questions. 
• Get bulk records for big populations more quickly.
• An excellent resource for future planning

Tools

Enterprise Data Warehouse:

• UW Student Database (UWSDB) Data Store
• Operational Data Store (ODS)

Enterprise Web Services: 

• Student Web Service (SWS)
• IdCard Web Service (IdCardWS)

Data Domain: Academics

• Created a SQL back-end database that: 
  • pulls student data from EDW’s ODS and UWSDB Data Store using custom SQL queries once a day to extract large amounts of data at once to populate the College’s database and merge with college-specific data
• Developed a front-end web application hosted by UW-IT that:
  • pulls data from SWS using REST API calls to support real-time viewing of student data

Takeaways

• A single, accessible source of truth provides value to faculty, advising, students, and the university.
• It is easy to combine institutional and college-specific data to deliver a complete picture.