Overview

Each dashboard is created by choosing a set of "widgets" that the academic unit believes will provide useful information to guide decision-making and improvement efforts. Widgets are UI components that provide a visualization of some aspect of research, teaching and service. For example, the "SSH" widget provides information about student semester hours taught by the academic unit.

Many widgets provide two modes: "rollup" and "drilldown". Rollup mode produces an aggregate value about the measure for the entire academic unit. For example, rollup mode for SSH shows a single aggregate value for SSH for each academic year for the academic unit. Drilldown mode provides a more detailed view, which is intended to help users understand how the aggregate value was arrived at. For example, the drilldown mode for SSH might show the SSH for each course, the trends over time, and the contribution to the overall SSH for the academic unit.

Widgets can also provide one or more "baselines": additional measures that can provide context helpful to interpreting the measure. For example, a baseline for SSH might be "SSH per FTE". This baseline could reveal, for example, that while the overall SSH for the academic unit has been trending down, the SSH per FTE has been stable or increasing. This reveals that the cause of falling SSH might be falling FTE, and thus a plausible way to improve this measure is to provide additional teaching resources.

In addition to pages oriented around the academic unit as a whole, the dashboard can provide a set of (unlisted) "faculty" pages. In addition to visualizations, faculty pages will provide mechanisms to download widget data in a format that makes it easy for faculty to provide data about teaching, research, and service for probationary review, tenure and promotion, and five year review. This is intended to significantly reduce the time required for faculty to prepare these reports.

Widget Overview#

The Requirements Analysis page provides details on how various measures were discovered to be of potential utility to an academic unit. The following section provides a listing of these and other measures.

Measures of "health" and "performance"#

Measures of "quality"#