Staff Excellence: Institutional Data Analytics + Assessment

Purdue University runs on data. It’s the force that enables decision-making, guides assessment and evaluation, and provides the basis for continuous improvement. And a huge chunk of it is collected, organized and distributed by the university’s Institutional Data Analytics + Assessment (IDA+A) team.

Housed within the Office of the Provost, IDA+A is responsible for transforming institutional data into rich bodies of strategic intelligence that are accessible, well defined and useful to university leaders and employees. The team consists of 45 full-time staff members, four undergraduates and three graduate students across six teams, including analytics, assessment, data engineering, data governance, data science and scenario planning, which strive to provide clear, insightful and actionable results that enable success across the university.    

“We help campus units make data-informed decisions,” says Molly Amstutz, senior director of IDA+A and chief data officer. “We help them evaluate the efficacy of their programs. We really are a support unit helping push the agendas of each and every one of the departments we serve across the university.”

IDA+A primarily serves all areas that fall under the Office of the Provost, along with Purdue University Online, but its impact also extends to the university at-large. Any individual — internal or external — can submit a data request for consideration through IDA+A’s website. Over the past year, IDA+A has worked directly with more than 550 Purdue employees from approximately 50 departments to fulfill requests for student data, survey samples and general projects.

The team also provides longitudinal, self-service reporting through dashboards on the Data Digest, a public-facing tool that provides interactive and visual information related to the university, and Management Dashboards, an internal tool used to support operations and strategic decision-making. Throughout this past year, Data Digest had more than 58,000 views with 550 unique internal users, and Management Dashboards generated over 11,000 views and 600 unique users.

In addition to reporting tools, IDA+A also provides faculty researchers access to Zeus, a high-compute machine used for cutting-edge experimentation, including generative AI using large language models, as well as faculty research.

IDA+A staff members are currently navigating this semester’s census event, marking the capture and “freeze” of the university’s latest official enrollment and admissions data, recently uploaded to the Data Digest. The weekslong process is never simple, but IDA+A professionals’ prowess always paves the way for a smooth, successful operation.

“It’s a huge team effort to get through this couple week stretch, but my team thrives on that,” Amstutz says. “They’re ready to go; they’re working together; and they’re executing. It’s indicative of how IDA+A collaborates internally and with our external partners. We don’t generally work on an island.”

As great as these employees are at collaborating, they’re even better at partnering with individuals and units across campus. They directly assist Student Success Programs by analyzing how Purdue can best support military students and their families and students with disabilities. They help the Center for Career Opportunities broadcast the value of a Purdue degree by sharing data related to student employment outcomes. They even play a pivotal role in evaluating a variety of campus initiatives and programs, like Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation and the Civics Literacy degree requirement.

IDA+A’s assessment team focuses on hearing students’ voices directly. One way is through the administration of the Student Experiences at Research Universities (SERU) survey, a unique, in-depth view of undergraduate students’ opinions about their academic and social experience, their engagement with enrichment opportunities and their overall satisfaction. SERU data is used by administrators, faculty and staff across campus for benchmarking, decision-making and strategic planning.

As Purdue’s institutional research office, IDA+A also routinely fulfills the university’s reporting obligations by providing student data to 16 regulatory and external agencies, including government agencies, data consortiums and media companies like U.S. News & World Report.

All of this is taking place as the IDA+A team is working behind the scenes to complete a broader, multiyear initiative: redesigning its student data warehouse. With the help of Purdue IT, IDA+A is rewriting all of its data products in an effort to craft a new environment that offers meaningful student data reports and dashboards at a quicker pace.

The new data warehouse project includes documentation in Purdue’s enterprise metadata tool, Data Cookbook, which contains over 5,000 definitions and 711 specifications. More than 2,900 Purdue users have utilized Data Cookbook to better understand the Purdue data landscape.

“It’s a major redesign and overhaul,” Amstutz says. “Essentially everything we have out there right now has to be scrapped and rebuilt, but I think our customer base is going to see huge benefits with that.”

Above all else, many of IDA+A employees’ favorite tasks are those that have a direct impact on student success. The group recently partnered with Teaching and Learning Technologies to create “Charlie,” an AI teaching tool that provides students instant feedback on how well their written assignments align with instructors’ rubrics. It’s just one of multiple projects IDA+A has taken on to improve outcomes for students.

“I hear from my staff frequently that the projects that tie to student success are the things that are most fulfilling,” Amstutz says. “That can be success academically or success after graduation, but it can also be simple quality of life things. They really are here to make sure that students have meaningful college careers.”

As the foundation of the Purdue data community, IDA+A’s job is never finished. There will always be more data to examine, more questions to answer and more improvements to make. But rest assured, this innovative team will always be on standby, ready to provide quality data that guides the university’s smooth operations and guarantees its continued success.