UMass Boston Implements HelioCampus Dashboards to Increase Use of Data
Over the past 18 months, UMass Boston has worked to implement a cloud-based data warehouse and a series of data analytics dashboards in partnership with HelioCampus, a higher education technology company founded in 2015 at the University of Maryland Global Campus.
The primary purpose of the dashboards is to strengthen data-informed decision making for the university, particularly in the area of holistic student success, in support of a key pillar of For the Times, the university's 10-year strategic plan.
The absence of easy access to institutional data at UMass Boston has frequently stymied efforts to identify and track the ways in which students are facing hurdles - whether in accessing the best academic pathways, getting registered for courses, programs with bottlenecks, or aligning resources to the most impactful solutions.
The new data warehouse will streamline data extraction and translation processes, while also increasing accessibility to near real time data dashboards. The initial dashboards provide data and insights related to admissions, financial aid, enrollment, course registrations, retention, and graduation. Over time, the platform and dashboards will provide data about every point during the student lifecycle, allowing the university to identify, measure, and monitor student success interventions.
The HelioCampus project is being led by the Provost’s office, in collaboration with subject matter experts from across campus, and in close collaboration with the Office of Institutional Research, Assessment, and Planning.
Initial construction of the data warehouse and data validation occurred in spring and summer 2023. The first set of dashboards were introduced in Fall 2023, when 75 users were given access to the data and trained on how to use the dashboards. Over the past year, the initial use of the dashboards has enabled refinement and strengthening of data quality, while additional dashboards have been under development. To enable data-informed decision making at all administrative levels of the university, access to the dashboards will be expanded to the entire campus by the end of the 2024-25 academic year.