DIG: Greater Data Integrity for Evaluation Administration Peace of Mind

We all know that data is key to the successful implementation of using Blue. But we also know that it can be a struggle to get the right data in place. Too often, the data in institutional information systems is incomplete, inaccurate or simply not up-to-date. This is a source of frequent frustration for those tasked with running and managing the course evaluation process and can involve a long and pain-staking manual process to improve the data. With the Data Integrity Gateway (DIG), those frustrations can be alleviated.

How can DIG help?

When preparing your data for your course evaluations, do you come across courses that have no teachers assigned? Or the wrong teachers have been assigned to certain courses?

These kind of situations are not at all uncommon for many institutions:

• a department may not yet have posted teaching assignments to the central information system,
• a personal emergency may have seen a teacher leave the roster unexpectedly and the department has not yet had the chance to change the assignment to the new instructor,
• or, you might find that courses are being flagged for evaluation that should not be. Again, the departments may not have had the time to update their records to indicate which courses should or should not undergo evaluation in a given term.

Normally, you would need to follow up with the departments to get the correct information updated to the SIS directly or, as is often the case, to get the correct information so that you can manually update your data files. Chasing the departments for their updated data can be a time consuming and convoluted process as you try to track many disparate pieces of information into your evaluation data files.

This is where DIG can come in. DIG is integrated directly into Blue, allowing you to create an automated process for getting the missing data from departments. You can use the DIG tool to:

• add or remove records from your existing data,
• or update the values within the individual records, and
• create and manage DIG projects in much the same way as you currently manage your Blue projects.

This will allow you to set a time-frame for the data integrity process. The people in the departments who know the data best can be assigned tasks to check and update the course teaching assignments or flag directly which courses should be part of the evaluation process so that you don’t have to – all via the DIG interface. No more to-ing and fro-ing with multiple excel spreadsheets and emails! Just a straightforward process to introduce more stability to your course evaluation process.

To find out more, visit our DIG pages or ask a question.