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Data Analytics for Decision Making at Academic Departments

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Conference

ASEE Zone 1 Conference - Spring 2023

Location

State College,, Pennsylvania

Publication Date

March 30, 2023

Start Date

March 30, 2023

End Date

April 12, 2023

Page Count

14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--45075

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/45075

Download Count

95

Paper Authors

biography

Ashwin Satyanarayana New York City College of Technology

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Dr. Ashwin Satyanarayana is currently the Chair and Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Systems Technology, New York City College of Technology (CUNY). Prior to this, Dr. Satyanarayana was a Research Scientist at Microsoft in Seattle from 2006 to 2012, where he worked on several Big Data problems including Query Reformulation on Microsoft’s search engine Bing. He holds a PhD in Computer Science (Data Mining) from SUNY, with particular emphasis on Data Mining and Big data analytics. He is an author or co-author of over 35 peer reviewed journal and conference publications. He has four patents in the area of Search Engine research. He is also a recipient of the Math Olympiad Award, and has served as Chair of the ASEE (American Society of Engineering Education) Mid-Atlantic Conference in 2018-2019. He also serves as an NSF (National Science Foundation) panelist.

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Abstract

In the era of big data where data is being embraced by academic institutions, each academic department has access to lots of data –enrollment data, retention data, student outcomes, faculty productivity, student success rates and resource allocation. As a large four-year public institution, our institution serves a diverse student body where more than 60% of students are considered as economic disadvantaged. In our department (comprising 1900 students and 120 faculty), we are currently using data-driven decision-making to gain deeper insights into the needs of students, faculty and staff. Such well-planned and implemented data-driven strategy has transformed those insights into student success – retention and enrollment. Another area that data-driven culture has benefitted is in creating an unbiased environment (between faculty-student, administration-faculty, and faculty-faculty) where collaboration and communication has become easier.

The main objective of this paper is to present our three data-analytic tools: predictive, descriptive and prescriptive and how they have improved student outcomes, intervened at-risk students, strategized cost cutting in the department, project actual outcomes and finally determining the effectiveness of our data-decisions. For example, our Predictive tool is helping identify potential low performing students at the course level and assigning them to mentoring and tutoring resources. Our Prescriptive tool is helping with strategies for cost-cutting suggestions and improving retention at the department level. Our Descriptive tool is helping with data-driven unbiased communication between staff, faculty and students at the college level.

Satyanarayana, A. (2023, March), Data Analytics for Decision Making at Academic Departments Paper presented at ASEE Zone 1 Conference - Spring 2023, State College,, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--45075

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