Improving educational effectiveness. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County has developed a national reputation for collecting and analyzing student data to help improve the educational effectiveness of our programs and services and to support individual students with available academic resources. More information about the student data UMBC collects is available here.
Data Management Committee
UMBC’s Data Management Committee (DMC) focuses on curating and using data as an institutional asset. The DMC is co-chaired by the Vice President of the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) and the Assoc. Vice Provost for Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRADS). Along with stakeholders and subject-matter experts from across campus, the DMC meets monthly to discuss data governance of UMBC’s Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse. Recurring topics of interest include data quality, data literacy, institutional and learning analytics, privacy, security, and training and support. More Information: DMC “Running Agenda” (UMBC login required).
Acceptable Use
It is UMBC’s philosophy to provide access to institutional data as broadly as possible. Access to UMBC data brings with it an obligation for responsible usage, which includes adherence to University, state, and federal policies that affect how institutional data can be used. Users accessing data must observe requirements for confidentiality and privacy, must comply with protection and control procedures, and must accurately present the data in any use.
Any requests for data by external parties, or for external usage, should be directed to the appropriate Data Manager for that data. Your access to data is authorized for internal usage and should not be used for external requests, unless approved by the Data Manager.
Examples of Acceptable Use
- Generate a list of students in my major, so I can contact them for advising
- Generate a list of new admits in my department, so I can contact them to encourage enrollment
- Generate a list of recent graduates for a departmental alumni listserv
Examples of Unacceptable Use
- Generate a list of admitted students or graduation candidates to inquire, on behalf of my neighbor, the status of their son’s application for admission or graduation.
- Supply an external company with a list of students in my department with GPAs less than 2.0, to market tutoring services
Use of Student Data
Why?
The University of Maryland, Baltimore County has developed a national reputation for collecting and analyzing student data to help improve the educational effectiveness of our programs and services and to support individual students with available academic resources. We’ve also worked with other institutions to develop best practices in transparency about use of student data.
The data UMBC collects is protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which allow institutions to analyze student data while also protecting its privacy. For more information, please see https://ogc.umbc.edu/ferpa-rights-notification.
What?
The types of student data that UMBC collects may include:
- Information included on student applications for admission, housing, and financial aid
- Course enrollment and extracurricular activity involvement
- Use of campus academic resources (i.e. Retriever Learning Center)
- Mid-year and final course grades
How?
UMBC will collect this information through:
- Web-based platforms and systems such as Blackboard, myUMBC, Request Tracker and other campus systems.
- Handheld electronic scanners or sign-in sheets
- Selected surveys
Who?
UMBC grants student data access to employees with an “educational interest,” including the following:
- Faculty
- Advisors
- Registrar’s Office staff
- Student Affairs staff
- Career Center
Questions?
For questions about the use of your data, please send an email to the Office of Enrollment Management (enrollment@umbc.edu) or the Division of Information Technology Privacy Office (privacy@umbc.edu).
Data Dictionary
The Data Dictionary is an off-campus service powered by the HelioCampus Console that allows REX to collect descriptions and definitions for reports, tables and fields used within REX. The data dictionary uses UMBC credentials, so you may be requested to log in if you have not already.
Content from this page https://analytics.umbc.edu/data-governance/data-dictionary/ with some cleanup (coming soon) since we do not use the data cookbook anymore, and are implementing an application from HelioCampus