Blog

As colleges and universities increasingly turn to data to make key decisions around retention, recruitment, and spending, greater awareness is being paid to data management and governance. In the industry, “there is a real struggle to connect data sets—across institutions—in meaningful ways,” says Pennie Turgeon, VP for IT and CIO at the New York Institute of Technology and former VP of IT and CIO for Clark University. Turgeon champions a more comprehensive approach to data management. We sat down with her to learn more about institutional challenges to data management, and best practices for making it all work.

Institutions of higher learning continue to move rapidly toward data-informed decision making, and this movement was strongly reflected at the 45th annual North East Association for Institutional Research conference. The City of Bridges played host to almost 400 representatives from over 200 institutions and associations to better understand methods and best practices for Creating the Bridge to Data-Informed Decision Making.

Another great EDUCAUSE conference is in the books! Last week, our team had the opportunity to attend this important conference to connect with clients & friends, and moderate a panel of education leaders.

Last week the HelioCampus team visited sunny Orlando for the AIR Forum. This is an important event that brings together higher education professionals working in institutional research, assessment, planning, and related postsecondary education fields. We spent two jam packed days talking to attendees about their analytics efforts, supporting our client partner presentations and getting feedback on our IPEDS Explorer tool.

I recently attended the 28th Annual Ithaca College EdTech Day with HelioCampus Director of Implementation Services, Susie Chang.   Ithaca College made its campus available to over 60 vendors and 200 attendees, ranging from regional vo-tech schools, local high schools and regional community colleges, as well as many of New York’s public and private colleges and universities.

Our team had such a great time at EDUCAUSE last week. It was fun to connect with current and future partners and clients, and see what’s new and trending in higher ed IT.

I had the opportunity to attend a timely session at the RTM Higher Education Congress a few weeks ago focused on “Data Governance and its Implications on Student Experience and Institutional Strategy.”  Given that I spend the majority of my time speaking with institutional leaders and stakeholders exploring paths for institutional analytics, across a broad set of colleges and universities, this is a very interesting topic to me.  Turns out that it’s also of great interest to leaders across IT, Enrollment Management and Academic Affairs as it was a packed house during the last session on the last day of the conference.