An idea becomes reality with the new DARS Tableau workbook
In October 2019, the Office of the Registrar embarked on a project after attending the Big Ten Academic Alliance Registrar meeting and seeing what University of Minnesota was doing to warehouse uAchieve (DARS) data for use in NCAA eligibility checks. Members of our office returned to Madison with the questions, “What if we could see every student’s progress toward any of their declared plans or requirements, at a glance? How might that help academic planners, curricular representatives, and Dean’s offices answer questions about course demand and requirement completion, or identify students in need of intervention?”
This sparked the Degree Audit Updater that is now complete and live. A Tableau workbook that allows authorized users to view detailed information about enrolled students’ progress toward any of their declared, “DARSable” plans. This Tableau workbook uniquely provides the ability to view aggregate DARS requirement and sub-requirement data for all enrolled students, at a glance. This workbook refreshes nightly, so it stays up-to-date when students do things like change a major or swap an enrollment section. By applying a variety of filters such as School/College, Academic Plan/Subplan, overall DARS Completion status, and Requirement/Sub-requirement Completion status, this ‘viz’ can help advisors answer questions that might otherwise require them to run a batch audit and open the DARS report for each student one-by-one. A significant effort went into this multi-part, multi-year project. Over the past several years, our DARS Team (1) worked with DoIT developers to create a semi-automated process that maintains an up-to-date version of every student’s DARS as of the start-of-business each day, (2) collaborated with the Office of Data Management and Analytic Services to warehouse this data in Snowflake (Badger Data/Badger Analytics) on a nightly basis, and (3) joined forces with the amazing Jennifer Donahoe to create the first-ever, campus-wide DARS Tableau workbook.
Sara Arnsdorf managed this project, and with the help of Eric MacKay, turned ideas into workable solutions. In addition to Office of Registrar staff, the DoIT Enterprise Integration team and the Office-formerly-known-as Data Management and Analytic Services were phenomenal partners in the technical development and data warehousing steps respectively. This project was also made possible because of collaboration and contributions from because over 50 advisors, curricular reps, academic planners, coordinators, directors, analysts, and assistant deans who participated in focus groups, listening sessions, and Tableau testing throughout the past 2.5 years.
Campus advisors and other key stakeholders have been informed of this incredible project and its completion. For questions and additional inquiries, people can be directed to dars@em.wisc.edu so that someone on our DARS team can handle their inquiry. Congratulations to all involved on this amazing project.