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IDA+A Products & Services

Institutional Data Analytics + Assessment offers services to the campus community for little to no cost. The table below describes the different areas of IDA+A and what types of services are available. To request our services, please submit a project request.  
  
If you have additional questions prior to submitting the form, contact idata@purdue.edu.  
  
More information is also available on IDA+A’s FAQs page. 
   
The analytics team performs research, statistical analysis, reporting, and generates insights in support of data driven decision making and transparency. 
    
Team Role and Book of Business 
Support Information Needs 
  • Dedicated resource for Provosts, President, Board of Trustees, Student Success, and Purdue Online fulfilling ad-hoc requests, supporting ongoing initiatives, and investigating new opportunities 
  • Mandated Reporting (e.g., IPEDS, ICHE) and Data Exchange Reporting (e.g., AAUDE, CSRDE, AAUP, CDS) 
  • Data Transparency for Public Consumption (e.g., Data Digest, COVID Dashboard) 
  • Ad Hoc needs of the data community 
Deliver 
  • Assemble (Data Handling: Clean, transform, create, blend) 
    • Datasets supporting reports and dashboards 
    • Datasets for stakeholders 
      • For or from emerging systems not supported by enterprise tools (e.g., Brightspace/D2L, Boiler Connect, Academic Analytics) 
      • Anonymized data for IRB approved research projects 
      • Assessment projects and surveys 
  • Analyze  
    • Apply descriptive, summary statistics 
    • Conduct statistical analysis (typically regression, ANOVA, HLM) 
    • Peer Comparisons typically utilizing AAUDE, IPEDS, National Rankings, or external data sources 
  • Interpret 
    • Discuss needs and results with stakeholders 
    • Provide narratives answering questions 
    • Provide context when data differs from expected or historic 
  • Report 
    • Self Service Reports (Cognos: Brightspace, Purdue Online) 
    • Dashboards (Tableau: Data Digest; COVID - Public, Executive, Surveillance, Housing, Contact Tracing, Classroom; Management Dashboards, Athletics, Survey Calendar, Purdue Online, CCO First Destination) 
    • Data visualizations 
Educate 
  • Contribute content to data training programs 
  • Author and revise metadata: data definitions and specifications 
  • Foster relationships with data professionals (e.g., EMAR, Grad School, Data Managers, FP&A, HR, BICC, Regional IR Offices – PG, PNW, PFW) and data consumers (e.g., Purdue Online, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Teaching & learning, TLT, Student Success, Advising, Athletics) 
Explore/Community 
  • Data Quality 
    • Support BI Upgrade Testing 
    • Provide Validation for Freeze Events 
    • Testing for new data sources (e.g., Brightspace) 
    • Review, validate analytical work product 
  • Lead and participate in core teams supporting emerging data needs for strategic initiatives (e.g., Purdue Moves: Transformative Education 2.0, Equity Task Force, COVID Return-to-campus planning) 
The assessment team helps campus partners design and implement rigorous and inclusive measures on learning, success, and development to ensure continuous improvement.  
    
Team Role and Book of Business 
The essential roles of the Assessment team are the following: 
  • Facilitator 
  • Investigator 
  • Integrator 
  • Reporter 
  • Expert in inquiry methods, measurement, and theories in higher education 
Beyond the values of the IDA+A unit, the following are important values for the Assessment team: 
  • Inclusion 
  • Practitioner- and student-centeredness 
  • Diversity 
  • Partnerships 
  • Effectiveness and efficiency 
  • Vulnerability, courage, and creativity 
The essential duties of any member of the Assessment team are the following: 
  • Planning for assessment and evaluation (i.e., logistics) 
  • Aligning assessment or evaluation questions with data needs 
  • Reporting findings (working in consultation with other IDA+A team members on anything that extends beyond descriptive analysis of data) 
  • Ensuring findings are immediately useful and informative 
  • Collaborating with internal and external partners on all of the above 
The Assessment team’s portfolio of work falls under the following, four, main areas: 
  • Assessing and measuring learning and development 
  • Building a culture for continuous improvement 
  • Programmatic or curricular evaluations 
  • Improving processes or methods for doing any of the above at Purdue. 
The Assessment team focuses on supporting decision-makers at Purdue that need to make evidence informed decisions related to teaching/learning and engagement. As of the writing of this article, the Assessment team does not have any explicit duties related to the research aspect of our institution’s mission (unless it relates to learning and development in research-based experiences [whether curricular or co-curricular]). 
The data engineering team manages Purdue’s Data Analytics Platform infrastructure and automates the flow of data from disparate sources into the analytics platform, for downstream analysis and research. 
  
Team Role and Book of Business 
Data Lake Infrastructure Management 
  • Architecture design and implementation 
  • Greenplum Account Management 
  • Partner with IT Infrastructure teams on topics including database and operating system upgrades, patches, backups and restores  
  • Tableau-Greenplum data integration to support Tableau dashboards  
ETL Process Design  
  • Design and write code in various programming languages to: 
  • Extract data from multiple data sources 
  • Transform data according to data science and analytics requirements 
  • Load data into the Greenplum database 
  • Greenplum-Informatica integration 
Data Flow Automation 
  • Design and maintain workflows in the automation tool Automic UC4 to automate ETL processes and data flows 
  • Respond to automation errors 
Faculty Research Support 
  • Manage the faculty research server Raiden, which supports advanced machine learning research 
  • Provide curated data sets to faculty, postdoctoral and graduate student researchers for IRB approved research projects 
Data Security and Compliance 
  • Partner with IT Security teams on data security in the Greenplum environment 
  • Enforce data compliance requirements like FERPA and GLBA in the Greenplum environment 
  • Partner with the IRB data owners and data stewards on data sharing agreements 
Data does not govern itself. People and the building of relationships are the most important component of data governance. 
  
Team Role and Book of Business 
  • Administer and support Data Cookbook metadata software. Enterprise source of data elements, standard reports and dashboards. Historical record of data fields. Versions indicate how conceptual definitions became understood.  
  • Data quality partnership with others on issues, resolution, mitigation, documentation. 
  • Project management  
  • Lead and/or participate in enterprise (data) committees  
  • Participate in projects to provide data governance expertise 
  • Campus communication re: data reporting environment  
  • Partnerships with IT (security) and BICC 
  • Support of Executive Data Council 
  • Partnerships with academic data managers 
  • Creation of data governance process, procedure, best practices 
  • Future automation of business logic and auditing to improve data quality 
The data science team designs statistical models and custom solutions to solve the university’s most unique and challenging data problems. 
  
Team Role and Book of Business 
Statistical Modelling 
  • Student Success – Athletics 
  • Admissions Melt – Housing, Admissions, Colleges 
  • Energy Usage – Energy & Utilities, Physical Facilities 
  • Donations – UDO 
  • Dining Demand – Student Life 
Unique Data Problems 
  • PACE – Course Urgency, Blocker Index, etc 
  • COVID off-campus sampling 
  • Network log space usage 
Ad Hoc Requests 
  • COVID contact tracing 
Dashboard Reporting of Predictions