So, you've got data... so what?

Whether it's an engineering student who can't articulate his ideas, a researcher who can't convey the importance of her findings, or a school that has access to years worth of longitudinal data, but doesn't know what questions to ask; data is worthless if it doesn't tell a compelling story. As schools get more serious about data-driven decisions, and vendors get better at providing data & tools, the real work begins.

If you could have the answer to any one question to make the some critical aspect of your university better, what question would you ask? Which instructors are doing the best job of preparing students for the next course in their sequence? What factors most directly influence your student retention? Which student demographics should you focus your limited recruiting budgets on? In which disciplines are your researchers being most frequently cited or asked to collaborate? These, among many other questions, might have been impossible to answer in the past.

Once you have results, how can you tell the story so that the results will mean something to others? If you can identify contributing factors, can you alter practices and procedures in a way that will influence the culture & act on the results?

I'm very excited about what Blackboard has done to open up the schema and access to data. The Analytics and Outcomes products also have great potential to provide vehicles through which schools can ask the right questions – but I think that Blackboard and its community) has a larger role to play.

The diversification we have seen in Bb's various learning environments should give Blackboard unique insight into those fundamental data elements that bind all of the various learning activities together. Through all of the diverse environments that they now bring together, they have an opportunity to form (and to provide guidance and mass to) a community that crosses boundaries of platform. A community that can discover the right questions to ask, how to ask them, and how to generate best practices that get at the most foundational elements of what education needs to be – to meet the challenges we are all facing.