Student and staff data now available in a flash thanks to SU experts
A team from the Information Governance Division (IG) at Stellenbosch University (SU) came up with a brilliant plan to make mountains of data about students and staff at South African universities more accessible to users.
This unique digital application will not only be of use to academics, department heads and managers at SU, but also to all higher education institutions in the country, explains René Robbertze, Senior Business Information Analyst at IOB.
"As far as we know, there is currently no overarching database in South Africa that makes all 26 higher education institutions' data accessible," says Robbertze. The Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS) data is requested and made available annually by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and is crucial for tertiary institutions' rating.
"It provides insights into aspects such as which courses are offered, how many students there are and what the pass rates are. The national student and staff data that the respective universities provide to the DHET do not contain any personal details, only broad demographic markers such as race, gender, field of study and programme," Robbertze emphasises.
This information can be requested from the DHET, but the format in which it is made available is not at all user-friendly – it consists of pages and pages of enormous Excel workbooks with only numbers and no visualisations. Moreover, the process of requesting the data is cumbersome and time-consuming.
Robbertze is also a ranking specialist at SU who in 2018 analysed data on the QS World University Ranking (QS WUR) and Times Higher Education (THE) rankings of universities in South Africa. “When it comes to university rankings, one wants to make sure the information is accurate, because otherwise there isn't a level playing field. I then realised that there was a need to centralise the data and make it more accessible for accurate insights. Instead of retrieving it from different sources and repositories, it makes sense to make everything available in one place."
The SU team set up two Microsoft Power BI 2 applications to be able to easily view and meaningfully process the data. This application makes it possible to view massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye and study a multitude of relationships that are not possible with printed publications. There is one set for students and one for staff with neat graphical representations of all the data from 2015 to 2021 from all 26 universities in South Africa.
It allows users to make comparisons between any of the available datasets. The biggest advantage is that university staff and researchers can now use the application themselves, explains Prof Ian Cloete, former Senior Director: Information Governance. “It's a good example of self-service business intelligence – each user's intelligence queries are served with the best information and they can extract the appropriate data themselves. You can obtain any combination of universities' data and also compare the different subject areas and academic years," he says.
This new way of viewing and interpreting data also has advantages for long-term planning, says Cloete. “When a faculty wants to investigate whether a new subject or academic programme is viable, the HEMIS data's accessibility now makes it much easier to explore where there are gaps and what has already been implemented at other universities. You can look at the distribution of students and gather demographic information that is valuable for planning purposes."
One of the interesting insights that the HEMIS dataset yielded is that compared to other South African universities, SU has a very high number of academics with doctorate and master's degrees, notes Cloete. This explains why SU is such a reputable research institution.
The data sets that IG processed are available for free to any user who has access to Microsoft's Power BI software. The choice of Power BI is largely because SU has an educational licence from Microsoft, but it is also a very powerful and efficient program, Cloete explains. "Power BI has modern artificial intelligence functions with facilities for machine learning and it provides insights where the program can automatically determine relationships between the data."
The data set is only the beginning, explains Robbertze. They are planning additional versions to look at other analyses that may be valuable to universities. “We have already received excellent feedback after launching the application on the SU campus. Faculty managers are particularly excited that, for the first time, they can see at a glance how subjects are distributed at other universities and what their student and staff distribution looks like," she says.
The application can also be useful for education authorities who can now easily get a broad overview of what is happening at different universities so that trends can be compared.
“It has many advantages and we are considering making it available to the other universities as well. People are very excited, because it has never been available in this format before," says Robbertze. “We welcome feedback and suggestions about further needs."
- SU staff who wish to use the application can follow this link:
This is the first version of the application and any comments, queries or suggestions can be directed to René Robbertze at [email protected].
- If a staff member does not yet have a Power BI licence for access, the following steps can be followed which are explained on IOB's website: