Why & How to Explore Analytics@UMBC
A brief (8 min) orientation and refresher
As part of UMBC’s data warehouse migration to HelioCampus, the Data Management Committee’s “Training & Outreach” working group has published a brief (8 min) video orientation on why and how to explore analytics @ UMBC.
Developed, in part, as a response to the 2006 Middle States Self Study, UMBC’s Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse was designed to help collect, integrate, report on, analyze and (importantly) act on data from a variety of campus systems such as Blackboard, PeopleSoft, and myUMBC. Not surprisingly, the current 2025-26 Middle States Self Study and UMBC 3.0 Strategic Planning initiative will also focus on continuous improvement through curated, campus-wide data to inform decision making.
In addition to the migration to HelioCampus, which constitutes REX 2.0, the orientation video also describes:
New and (likely) soon-to-be-required training on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to access campus systems like PeopleSoft and REX itself.
How to find and use free training videos about Tableau’s “viewer” role, which will be used to access predefined (“canned”) reports largely migrated from REX 1.0 that used Microsoft Reporting Services (RS) reports.
A new “Analytics @ UMBC” Blackboard community where anyone can learn more about REX, “actionable intelligence,” and (eventually) even do some hands-on, self-paced data analysis with dummy data and AI.
How to get involved with UMBC’s analytics community of practice, including the REX developers’ and users’ groups.
Posted: May 14, 2025, 1:44 PM
