Jacob Kemp

Head of Business Development in Further & Higher Education

The Top 6 Challenges Colleges Face in 2017

Creating and sustaining a viable financial and funding model that can adapt to market changes

Creating a truly agile organisation that can anticipate, influence and react to change and manage the risks and complexity that comes with that change

Creating the optimum environment to create and sustain learning excellence and deliver the complete learning experience

Delivering more from less by simultaneously cutting costs and achieving more effective outcomes for employers and learners

Meeting the changing needs and expectations of learners of all ages to deliver lifelong learning

Partnering with local employers to ensure that the curriculum meets the changing needs of employers, individuals and the communities

Effort and Importance of Challenges Faced

“Providing greater access to data, which will better inform decision making and develop skills, was this year cited by 58% of respondents as crucial compared to 45% in 2016”

“Enhancing technology as a way of meeting new government expectations is seen by 46%

of respondents as a priority in 2017”

All challenges in the strategic investment quadrant (Jisc, 2017)

Technology expectations of FE Institutions

• BYOD & CYOD

• Blended Learning

• Social Learning

• Education in the Cloud

• Anywhere Learning

• Fast and responsive communication

• Accurate and streamlined reporting

• 24 hour resource

Dynistics for Colleges

External pressure for data: Governors, Ofsted and mergers. Keeping up with changing demands

MIS backlog: inundated with ad hoc reporting requests and long wait

times

Common Reporting Challenges?

No one version of the truth

Spreadsheet fatigue

Lack of tools to drive quality improvements

Lack of accountability

Newham College

The Challenge

“We spent a lot of time and energy looking for data that wasn’t always easy to come by.”

Outcomes

• Improved student retention, funding and success rates

• Year-long wait for student withdrawal figures reduced to four weeks

• Improved financial health: from Adequate to Good

• 7% increase in staff utilisation equated to a saving of tens of thousands of pounds

• Cultural Shift – No more “them” and “us” culture

• Self-serving BI

Westminster Kingsway College

The Challenge

“Across the college, data was held in a variety of different systems. Accessing that information was often a time-consuming manual process”

Why Dynistics?

“When you talk about dashboards in education, you’re talking about Dynistics. The two just go together. We selected Dynistics for its expertise and experience with colleges, and the added value that can bring us.”

Outcomes

• Implemented dashboards to display the college’s ProAchieve data on attendance, retention and success (SAR) across all courses

• Saved the MIS team almost 100 hours of time regularly spent on reporting activities• Instant access and ability to really see the results revealed from our data• Functioning dashboards up and running following one day of implementation

Live Demonstration and Presentation

Gordon Gillespie

Vice Principal Curriculum, Teaching and Learning

Lewisham Southwark College

Lewisham Southwark College

Apply parameters and filters Giving users the ability to slice and dice data

Keep it relevant to the user Make sure it’s designed with the user in mind

Ensure the data is reliable Any variation between systems will discredit the dashboards

Implementing your reporting tools: DO

Implementing your reporting tools: DON’T

Overcomplicate itDashboards should provide insight at a glance, keep it simple.

Play around with the formattingConsistency is key to user adoption by ensuring the data is recognizable to users

Create a dashboard for the sake of it Every item must have a purpose and a call to action

Any questions? Visit Stand 56 to discuss how

dashboards can transform how your college deals with data.