Data viz compiles course, enrollment info for responsible research trainings

A new tool created by the Office of the Registrar will provide more enrollment information for the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) trainings that UW–Madison researchers take. The NIH RCR Courses and Enrollment data visualization, which launched in August, shows which courses meet the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) RCR training guidelines and enrollment in those courses from Academic Year 2019-2020 to the present. The resulting data will help the Office of Training Grant Support (OTGS), principal investigators, research administrators, and employees completing grants determine which courses are the most popular and make more informed decisions about course offerings.

Creating the visualization

The tool was born from a request by the OTGS for a way to highlight all courses that meet the NIH guidelines. In early 2024, the RO’s Data Reporting and Eligibility (DRE) team compiled a list of courses, instructors, and enrollment information into a shared document for OTGS to use while working to find a more robust tool to use in the long term. With the goals of automating the process for the future and making the data available more broadly, the team came up with a Tableau visualization. To populate the visualization, the RO’s Curricular Services team created a section-level course attribute in SIS to identify eligible courses. Once that was done, the DRE team queried the course data, reviewed it for accuracy, then built the visualization. The visualization can be found in the NIH Training Topics KnowledgeBase (KB) document.

Looking ahead

Now that the tool has been built, in future terms data will be populated automatically. RO BI Developer Cori Stewart will present it to training grant administrators at the Training Grant Directors Fall Meeting later this year.

Background

Under Policy UW-4022 (UW–Madison NIH RCR Training), “Trainees, fellows, participants, and scholars supported by some types of D, F, K, R, T, and U awards are required to complete a minimum of eight hours of face-to-face training every four years.” Trainings focus on highlighting ways researchers can conduct their work ethically and responsibly. Before this work began, researchers were being approved individually, but there was no central collection of RCR training courses or enrollment figures for those courses. Courses are still manually approved.