Evisions Blog
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IPEDS Surveys Reporting: ‘Tis the Season (Part 1)
“To everything there is a season.” Whether you recognize that line from The Bible or The Byrds, it’s a commonly known phrase with wide-ranging applications. For Institutional Researchers, the everything is their IPEDS surveys and the season is...
Improving Accessibility for Argos Dashboards
When designing a dashboard, you're usually thinking about things like which parameters are required, the type of information your users want to see, and how you can lay everything out on the form so that it makes sense. What you might not have...
Using Maturity Models for Data Validation in Higher Education
There are multiple ways of assessing where your institution is at regarding data validation and data governance. In this discussion, we’ll look at data validation as it relates to maturity models. The maturity model is an assessment of the data...
How to Build Trust In Your Higher Education Data: 10 Key Steps
Higher education institutions need to trust their data so that they can engage in effective decision-making. But building trust is not easy. So, we figured we would provide you our ten steps to build this trust. 1. Data requests should be a...
Higher Education Data Governance Explained
If you work at a college or university, there may be plenty of topics that generate more attention than “data governance,” but do any of these three ‘progress-stoppers’ ring a bell? You’re in the Office of Institutional Research. Today, your job...
Best Practices for Dashboard Design
The difference between an art museum and an art gallery is subtle. Museums showcase art for the art enthusiast – for interest, critique or discussion. Museums tend to be grandiose, containing all types of art, separated by theme or artist. While...
Best Practices for Charting Your Higher Education Institution’s Data
“One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.” The phrase, often attributed to Fred Barnard after it appeared in the advertising trade journal Printer’s Ink, also applies to the visual presentation of data. While our focus is often on higher education,...
Overcoming Data Integration Issues
Data. It’s a simple word. Yet collecting it, analyzing it, and understanding it isn’t always so simple. For institutions of higher education, this is usually the result of two circumstances: 1) Data from one source does not always match data from...
The 5 Most Commonly Found Metrics for Student Success
There is much debate on how to define and measure student success. At first glance, it seems simple: a successful student is a first-year who enrolls in college full-time, persists through terms, and then progresses to degree completion. However,...
Getting Your Reporting Efforts Aligned with Your Fundraising Goals
“What the New Year brings to you will depend a great deal on what you bring to the New Year.” – Vern McLellan The adage is as true in business practices as it is in personal practices. The start of a new year, whether it’s the calendar year or...
A Data-Oriented Approach to Higher Education
Making use of data can be difficult. For instance, many institutions still face the challenge of getting departments to agree on answers to questions such as, “What is an active enrolled student?” Meanwhile, students, accreditors, governments,...
Doing the Impossible in FormFusion: Creating a Fully Customized PO
Template designers know that Evisions FormFusion provides flexibility in the look and layout of documents. However, due to the variable nature of some Banner output (i.e. transcripts and purchase orders), versatility of data mapping and control is...
The Process: It’s Not Just for Acting (It’s for Reporting Too!)
To report, or not to report - that is the question. Okay, maybe it’s not a question. For many of you, reporting is your job, or at least part of it. As such, you need your report creation procedures to be as painless and as efficient as possible....
How Do I Know if My Reporting Staff is Effectively Trained?
So your institution just purchased a new reporting solution and you would like to train your employees on this product. Or perhaps you had a recent turnover in staff and would like to train these new individuals on the existing software without...
Successful Training Starts With the Manager
You already heard about the discovery process needed to assess whether or not training will be an effective solution to your reporting problems. Once you’ve decided it is necessary, the next key step is to establish a training goal. After all, once...