Category: Uncategorized

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Bozeman!

By the Office of Planning and Analysis, Montana State University (OPA@montana.edu)

Dear RMAIRians,

Along with our friends in IR across the state of Montana, we are gearing up for a fabulous 2016 annual meeting in beautiful Bozeman, Montana! Mark your calendars now for our mountain-inspired RMAIR Annual Meeting, “IR Peaks and Valleys,” October 26-28. Please note that these dates have been changed since we announced them last fall to accommodate Yom Kippur as well as a Fall IPEDS deadline. We hope this helps more of you to attend!

We’re planners by nature, so in the interest of helping you plan, we’ve come up with some to-do lists with appropriate subsets.

Things to do right now:

  • Reserve October 26-28 on your calendar
  • Contact Dawn Ressel, Program Chair, to volunteer to review proposals (Ressel@mso.umt.edu)
  • Start pitching RMAIR 2016 attendance proposals to your supervisor, repeat weekly
  • Budget for multiple staff members to attend
  • Start planning your RMAIR presentation, poster, panel, or pre-conference workshop
  • Talk to your colleagues, faculty, and students about their interests in RMAIR-related research, repeat weekly

Things to do over the next few months:

  • Watch for the call for proposals
  • Draft your proposal for a pre-conference workshop, paper, panel, or poster
  • Invite your colleagues to come with you to Bozeman
  • Watch for hotel information
  • Register for RMAIR 2016 as a participant, presenter, or quiet backrow sitter

Things to do at RMAIR in Bozeman:

  • Present a paper on the high peaks in IR, assessment, strategic planning, cross-campus collaboration, or student success at your campus
  • Present a paper on your current research related to higher ed.
  • Present a paper on the lessons learned from the low valleys
  • Display a poster (if presenting is not your style)
  • Moderate a panel discussion with your colleagues on a topic of interest to IR professionals
  • Lead a pre-conference workshop to teach your colleagues across the region a new skill or software package or to improve IR processes
  • Meet with vendors who have products and services of interest to IR professionals
  • Hang out with amazing graduate students, faculty, and IR professionals
  • Enjoy an entertaining, relaxing, social, and slightly educational Thursday night event at the Museum of the Rockies

Things to do in Bozeman at the end of the conference day or over the weekend:

Things to do around Bozeman at the end of the conference day or over the weekend:

We look forward to climbing new peaks of knowledge with you in Bozeman, October 26-28, 2016!

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Job Announcement

Received from: Ann Murray, Director of Institutional Research, Laramie County Community College

Laramie County Community College has an opening for a Research Analyst. Find out more at:

https://careers-lccc.icims.com/jobs/1890/research-analyst%2c-institutional-research/job

Applicant screening begins on March 21.

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RMAIR – Update

By Joseph Curtin, Assistant Commissioner – Institutional Research & Analysis, Utah System of Higher Education

I am pleased to announce that representing RMAIR at this year’s Annual Forum in New Orleans will be RMAIR 2015 – Best Paper winner Renate Otterbach, University of San Francisco “Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods to Identify Modifiable Factors for Retaining First-Time Freshmen” as well as the RMAIR 2015 – Best Presentation Mark Leany and Robert Loveridge, Utah Valley University “Course Enrollments – Our Interactive Dashboard, from the Why to the How”. This year’s AIR forum will be held in New Orleans on May 30th to June 3rd. For those of you who will be attending the National Forum please consider applying for a RMAIR Train-the-Trainer grant.

The Train-the-Trainer grant provides $500 to members to attend a workshop at any conference related to institutional research, but emphasizes support for the AIR Forum because of its matching grant program. AIR Forum Support awards will be matched by AIR for a total of $1,000. Presentation of the workshop at the RMAIR Conference is a mandatory condition of the award. Members receiving awards who do not present must repay all awards to RMAIR and, if AIR matching funds were awarded, to AIR. Members should email the Train-the-Trainer application to the RMAIR Secretary (secretary@rmair.org), describing why they should be considered for the Train-the-Trainer program subsidy as well as what benefits that their training would bring to RMAIR.

In addition to the RMAIR presentations, please add to your schedule at the Forum the RMAIR SIG meeting that is usually held on the Wednesday evening. I can’t guarantee a post-meeting dinner like last year, but you should be able to take advantage of the opportunity to connect with your RMAIR colleagues.

Highlights of the 2016 AIR Forum include:

  1. Compelling keynotes by thought leaders in higher education: Higher Education in the New Normal of the 21st Century – An Era of Evidence-Based Change by David Longanecker, Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education President, and Data-driven Behavioral Nudges: A Low-cost Strategy to Improve Postsecondary Education by Ben Castleman, author and University of Virginia Assistant professor;
  2. More than 300 concurrent sessions reviewed and presented by your peers;
  3. The opportunity to network and share ideas with 2,000 colleagues from around the world.

Register by February 26 and save $25 off the regular registration fee. To register or for more information, visit the 2016 AIR Forum website.

Finally, The RMAIR Annual Conference is scheduled for October 26th -28th in Bozeman, Montana. Thanks goes to Rebecca Belou (Rebeccabelou@montana.edu), RMAIR 2016 Local Arrangements Chair, and Dawn Ressel (dawn.ressel@umontana.edu), RMAIR 2016 Program Chair, for their work in putting together this year’s meeting. Please consider submitting a proposal for a pre-conference workshop, paper, or other work for presentation at the conference. Also, now would be a good time to invite faculty and students who teach or are studying education-related topics to join us and present some of their research. A call for proposals should go out late-spring or early summer so now is a good time to start making plans for Montana.

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‘Tis the Season

Knowing everyone’s offices are likely buzzing with the end-of-year rush, I opted to avoid bugging people for blog posts this month and searched the Web for a festive substitute. Luckily for RMAIR, we data-geeks and techies tend to be silly sometimes, so I found the perfect article on InfoWorld.com. Please enjoy “Data Insights: The Twelve Days of Christmas (a Data Carol)” by Yves de Montcheuil, an amusing rendition of the traditional carol that incorporates big data:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2862077/big-data/the-twelve-days-of-christmas-a-data-carol.html

See you again in 2016!

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What’s So Hard About Playing with Numbers?

By Dianna Renz, Director of Planning and Improvement, Western Wyoming Community College

Woo-hoo! Rock on! There it is: the happy dance you do when you’ve completed a major reporting project! This is the feeling of satisfaction you get for a job well done. A competent smirk arrives when you’ve successfully built the query and it spits out the information you need. There’s a definite thrill when you put a number in each and every cell in the reporting template. Take it one step further and you can feel the creative high of building pivot tables to discover the fascinating details of your data. With this information you can uncover important information for your stakeholders, which you present in a colorful chart. This is the lovely part of Institutional Research that fulfills the “OCD” in the heart of—and inspires the artist in the soul of—each IR practitioner. This is what makes it all worthwhile, but this is not the difficult part.

No, the difficult part of the Institutional Research field is not the act of doing it. The hard part of the job is serving multiple masters with competing deadlines and agendas. When VFA, CCA, and NCCBP are all due in the same month, how do you divide your time? And where do you prioritize an internal request from the math department for a longitudinal study of student matriculation and success? What about the feeder institution that keeps begging you for information about students who transfer to your institution? Oh, and don’t forget the ad-hoc request from the state legislature!

What is the use of completing reporting efforts if we cannot use the information returned to us? Delving into the data is the fun part; the challenge is finding the time to conduct this critical exploration. Our office has made a commitment to use the data derived from mandatory reporting for other efforts. Using nationally- or state-normed data for comparison to institutional numbers is an excellent approach to inform strategic action projects, and to assess existing initiatives. Our Assessment of Student Learning Team uses CCSSE data, for example, as a qualitative assessment of student learning gains. Our Building Student Connections Team uses math and English pass rates from NCCBP as a quantitative assessment of retention and completion efforts.

Sharing new approaches at the annual RMAIR conference is an exciting part of the job. Presenting at RMAIR means selecting something you’ve done well to showcase for the greater good. What we don’t share are the messy conversations we have with our internal and statewide colleagues regarding the sticky subjects of common coding, extract validation, data integrity, and faulty BI reporting. Research shows there are as many as 250 different ways to wash the dinner dishes, and there are certainly as many varied approaches to institutional data standards and extraction methodology! As I’ve learned from Wyoming’s effort at common coding, reaching agreement among practitioners is often difficult.

But it’s no wonder that we struggle to reach consensus: Institutional Research is still an uncategorized field. Although I’ve learned that some folks have served in IR for over 30 years, there still does not exist a recognized degree in the field (graduate-level certificates do exist, but institutions are divided on whether the certificate is offered through the School of Education, the School of Psychology, or the School of Business). As a result, the strength of this field is that current practitioners have arrived from a wide variety of backgrounds. I know of individuals with degrees in math, psychology, astrophysics, library science, business, and English, just for example. As IR offices are increasingly connected with other institutional effectiveness efforts like assessment and accreditation, this vast experience serves us well, as quality IR is both a science and an art.

In truth, the work we do is critical for the greater success of higher education and student learning, but this charge is not to be taken lightly. Although the thrill is there, our work is NOT just about filling in the boxes of a reporting template. Using information for the lofty goal of continuous quality improvement is both valid and necessary. We must, then, continue to use all our resources to do the work of finding The Answer, but not creating the answer; serving multiple masters, but remaining true to the spirit of inquiry; and sharing successful approaches while always practicing “virtuous data politics.”*

*This succinct phrase borrowed from a discussion on “the Dark Side of Data” at the 2015 RMAIR conference. If you missed this conversation, you really missed out!

What do you find are the most enjoyable parts of your job as an IR professional versus the most challenging? What is your perspective on the practice of “virtuous data politics?”

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RMAIR 2015 In Review

By Jeff Johnson, Assistant Director of Institutional Effectiveness & Planning, Utah Valley University

“Dear God, please don’t let me screw up.”
—Test Pilot’s Prayer, attr. to astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr.

I am quite pleased to say that, thanks to some combination of divine grace and an outstanding team of institutional research professionals, I’ve managed to not screw up RMAIR during my year as president. It has been a very successful year for the association, with many accomplishments to celebrate.

Our annual conference is the focus of RMAIR’s efforts, and this year’s was outstanding. Nearly 100 paid attendees met in Las Vegas earlier this month, the most in recent memory. A fascinating keynote from Stephen R. Porter on the validity and future of student surveys led off a program of 34 presentations organized by program chair Serge Herzog. Local arrangements chair Theresa Farmer’s stellar work on the venue and logistics gave RMAIR members plenty of opportunities to rekindle old relationships and make new connections, and kept costs much lower than we expected. Thanks to the wonderful work of sponsorship chair Tondra De, we raised $16,900 from sponsors. While the final bills aren’t in, we expect to make at least $5,000 on the conference in spite of not charging membership fees this year. I can’t thank enough Theresa, Tondra, and Serge, along with Christina Drum, Mya Starling, Andrea Esguerra, and Mike Ellison for what they did to produce a successful conference.

We have had great financial success as well. We expect the conference to make between $5,000 and $8,000 for the association after all is finalized. That will leave us with approximately $30,000, consistent with our goal of having a reserve of between 1.5 and 2 times the typical conference costs. Working with treasurer Quinn Koller, we have also put in place streamlined processes for financial management of the conference that should allow our success to continue while easing the administrative challenges.

Our previous financial success allowed us to offer free membership this year. That has brought in several entirely new members as well as maintaining membership of many previous members who would not have joined this year because they were not attending the conference; historically very few people have paid membership dues when they weren’t attending. The board has thus decided to continue to offer free membership for 2015-16.

I am pleased especially to have been able to honor several members this year. Thanks to a partnership with AIR, we were able to match our grants with AIR Travel Grants. Serge represented RMAIR at the AIR Forum as the best paper. We also awarded the best presentation grant to Stephanie Kane and Fran Hermanson. We didn’t award any Train the Trainer grants, however, so I encourage you to consider applying for 2016.

The board continued its work to implement the strategic plan while also rethinking its place in the organization. Vice President Joe Curtin implemented the outreach elements, targeting especially institutions with graduate programs in higher education. Incoming Vice President Dianna Renz will be reaching out to IR offices that are not currently involved in RMAIR, building on work done last year by Mya Starling. This coming year we are due for a new plan. This will be informed by our experience with the existing one and will aim to be more realistic about our capabilities and commitments.

Our future will also need to recognize, however, that RMAIR is in a changed environment in which our history of informality is challenged by increasing regulation and a transfer of much of the legal and financial responsibility for the association from AIR to us. Banking regulations designed to prevent terrorist financing and laundering of drug money require us to demonstrate that any change in the account holders is consistent with the bylaws; hence the importance of bylaws that clearly define election rules in ways that will be accepted by courts and lawyers, not just our members. Non-profit status and incorporation are necessary to protect the organization and its officers—it would have been quite easily for officers to have accidentally committed tax fraud before we gained 501(c)(3) status.

The bylaw review has identified several areas in which we will, of necessity, have to change in ways that we aren’t all comfortable with. The contemporary world leaves us with only the alternative of not existing. The board will be working on this in the coming year, and will seek input from and will communicate fully with the members as we do. It is the greatest challenge that RMAIR faces right now. I ask your patience and understanding as we continue this process.

These are only a few of our accomplishments. I can claim little credit for them; they happened on my watch but they happened because we have exceptional people in RMAIR. I am humbled to have worked with such an effective board over the last year: Joe, Quinn, Secretary Tammy Scott, and Past President Ann Murray. I also relied heavily on the generous advice of two former RMAIR Presidents, Nick Valcik and Dawn Kenney. I am pleased to welcome Dianna to the board as Vice President and President Elect. I have great confidence in the coming year’s leadership, and wish all of us continued success.

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(Dis)Order From Chaos

By Ann Murray, Director of Institutional Research, Laramie County Community College

The IR Office at Laramie County Community College needed a better way to receive and track ad hoc project requests and document how much staff time these project consume. (We had been using an Excel file that was usually out-of-date and a PDF project request form, entering the information from the request manually.) After looking at several software packages, we have adopted Smartsheet. It seemed to best fit our needs for several reasons.

  • It looks a lot like Excel, so it has been easy to learn. You can create different sheets for different kinds of information; we have one for ad hoc project requests and one for tracking staff time.
  • We were able to create an online project request form and have the information go directly into the ad hoc project request sheet, which means we will be saving some data-entry time.
  • We can attach documents to the sheets.
  • We can share sheets among staff members across the college.
  • We can create reports to show what staff members are spending their time on and how much time we spend on ad hoc or regular reporting, training, etc.
  • It’s relatively inexpensive (there are several pricing options).

We haven’t got it perfectly setup yet, but we’re making progress and it will help us streamline some things. If you need software to do formal Project Management, Smartsheet might not be for you. But if you’re trying to get a handle on all the things you do, check it out at smartsheet.com.

How do you organize your office work?

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PowerPoint and Running Agendas

By Taylor Lovell, Research Analyst, Utah Valley University

Imagine you and a friend are unloading a box full of tennis balls. Would you like your friend to throw you each ball individually? No, it would be too difficult to collect and organize the balls. Would you like your friend to throw you the whole box at once? Maybe some of you are strong and agile enough, but that box would be difficult to catch. Would you like your friend to throw you cans of balls, containing three or four each? Yes! It would be much easier to catch and organize the cans.

So too it is with presentations. It is much easier for your audience to “catch” the information you are sharing with them if that information is packaged together appropriately. Below I outline one way to indicate to your audience when you are “throwing” them a new package of information: the running agenda. I also give you an example of how to use a running agenda.

Most presentations follow a typical format: Opening, Agenda, Body, and Closing (OABC). After your catchy introduction, you give the audience an outline of what they can expect from the presentation. You can easily adapt this outline to a running agenda.

  • Step #1 – Give short titles to each section of your presentation.
  • Step #2 – Place those titles somewhere on each slide where they won’t interfere with your content. (e.g. bottom of the slide).
  • Step #3 – As you progress through your presentation, highlight the title of the section you are currently presenting (e.g. bolded text).

The example below is from the presentation of a marketing survey UVU recently conducted. You can see the running agenda on the left hand side (Intro, Media, Marketing, Message, Q & A). Because this slide about social media use was part of the Media section of the presentation, I highlighted the word “Media” in my running agenda with a green oval. This highlight serves as a reminder to the audience that we are in the Media section of the presentation.

Image by Taylor Lovell
Image by Taylor Lovell

As you organize the content of your presentations into packages – and use running agendas to indicate which package you are currently “delivering” – your audience will (1) follow along better, (2) pay closer attention, and (3) retain more information. Even better than the efficacy of running agendas is just how easy they are to put together. Try one today!

Have you used running agendas in your presentations or attended a presentation that used a running agenda? What did you think? Would you consider using a running agenda? Share your comments below!

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Something New On the Horizon

Welcome to the first-ever Panorama blog post! I am Sarah Smith, your Panorama editor. I am a data analyst at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, WY and have been in this position since November 2013. I became Panorama editor at the Denver AIR Forum in May 2015. RMAIR recently decided to shift Panorama into the blogosphere since the officially published newsletters had become difficult to maintain. A big shout-out to all those folks who worked diligently to publish the Panorama newsletters for so many years!

The overarching goal of the Panorama blog is to act as a communication hub that promotes a friendly spirit of unity and cooperation among RMAIR members. Panorama differs from the RMAIR listserv in that the listserv contains posts on job vacancies, meeting minutes, and specific questions posed by RMAIR members to the RMAIR community. The Panorama blog, however, aims to present an idea, a bit of research, a state of affairs in IR offices, IR-related jokes and ironies – anything that can come across as thought-provoking or stress-relieving in no more than 300-500 words (for your reference, this particular post is under 250 words). Let’s keep these posts short and sweet so everyone can fit reading and writing them into their busy days! The goal is one post a month with the potential to post more often in the future.

What would you like to see in the Panorama blog? What do you expect to get out of it? Let’s see what you think!