In any big institution, there are essentially multiple layers of bureaucracy. It is necessary in order to organize and divide tasks among differently specialized people. With the right tools, however, large projects can be managed across departments. Before we dive into “the how,” let’s go over Tableau’s functions.
- Data blending (merge multiple sheets, files, and sources)
- Real-time analysis (live connection capability)
- Minimal technical skills (no programming knowledge required
- Easily extract data from multiple sources (excel databases, cloud services, SQL databases, Oracle databases, etc.)
- More secure than Excel and easier to use for large amounts of data or exploring data visually.
- Building and sharing dashboards, stories, and reports.
All higher education institutions need to secure their data, likely have large amounts of data from varied sources, and require substantial teams to tackle large projects with high stakes. Let’s say your school wants to raise the number of female graduates from their engineering department. You’ll first want to try to understand the full picture of the female engineering student’s experience.
How do they find your program? How do they feel about the program during different points in their studies? Do they have all the resources (financial, tutoring, mental health, academic advising, etc.) that they need? How do the experiences and graduation rates differ between the different majors under engineering? Are their demographic differences among the female students that impact their success or satisfaction?
To best answer all of these questions, you will need to combine vast amounts of data from different departments, admissions, retention/success services, tutoring, financial aid, scholarships, etc. You will also want to conduct surveys to understand students’ personal experiences. Once you’ve gathered all of this preliminary data, you can start to act on the things that will help you recruit more female engineering students and improve the graduation rates of current and future female engineering students. Using Tableau, you would be able to easily combine the different forms of data and share a dashboard among the administrators of each of the involved departments securely.
Being that tableau does not require any programming skills and that visualizing the data makes it much easier to spot patterns, actionable insights can be gleaned much more quickly. Quicker actions can mean that substantial amounts of time and money can be saved; not to mention, students will be able to benefit from your work much sooner.