An important tool to address how institutions are failing certain student populations is analytics. Colleen Carmean discusses how we can do the work of finding out why we are failing and commit to change.
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Author:
Colleen Carmean
Founder, Ethical Analytics Group
University of Washington, Tacoma
Gerry Bayne: So just to start off, can you just tell me your name, position and institution and maybe a little bit about your background? How did you found the ethical analytics group?
Colleen Carmean: I am Colleen Carmean. I recently founded the ethical analytics group after Linda Baer and I did a handbook in 2019, exploring the issues of how higher ed is moving into that space, and we realized there are so many questions and so little known both about the practice and about how to create a culture that I created from so many of the people that helped us. A consortium willing to explore these questions from a lot of different angles. I think that is the thing we learned, that you need to bring such diversity to the table to start defining the practice of analytics and higher ed and that's where so many of us are struggling.
Gerry: Much like the way you have instructional technologists working with faculty to help them interpret what they need in a course, what technologies are appropriate and how to sort of shepherd them through the process of implementing that technology to their pedagogy. Is there movement for someone from analytics to be in those meetings that maybe don't have to do with analytics but are using analytic tools to help shepherd through what we're really looking at, how do we interpret this, how do you make decisions based on this? Or is it sometimes the two sides don't talk to each other?
Colleen: It's a very slow growing culture but I think it is the most important piece of whether analytics will survive on a campus. You have to have leadership that's willing to change but to create a culture of analytics that says we have evidence that we are failing certain populations. We need to do the work of finding out why and we need to commit to change, which is hard. I am so admiring of…there's a consortium called the University Innovation Alliance. I think it's 11 or 12 campuses that are holding each other accountable for this work and that is amazing right? They share with each other the findings and the changes they made and I think when you have a community like that and you have that competition that they're really putting forward at a leadership level, amazing things are happening at those institutions and I think that we're all capable of doing that and I would put forward here that Educause can help with that. You don't need to form an amazing consortium of presidents and chancellors and whatever but we can put together an understanding of best practices, of a commitment to having goals and principles of your campus that defines who's allowed to see the data and what is it and what we'll do with it and how no one should be allowed to look at the data and then unilaterally send a note out to students. There should be a process in place.
Gerry: Right.
Colleen: You know, and I think if we came together as a community, all that would be so much easier than doing it alone.