  WEBVTT

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Hester, Brian: How do we work? How do we keep our work grounded and relevant?

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Hester, Brian: How can we, collab? How can collaboration help us do both?

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Hester, Brian: We're fortunate to have 4 incredible panelists with us today who are asking those questions every day

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Hester, Brian: and leading efforts to answer them

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Hester, Brian: before we dive in. I want to briefly introduce each of them, and then we'll give them a chance to to say a few words about themselves and their role.

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Hester, Brian: Bridget, decent, is Associate Vice Provost for Strategic Analytics at the University of Memphis.

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Hester, Brian: James Hunt is Associate Vice Provost and Chief Data Officer and Analytics Officer at Florida, State University.

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Hester, Brian: Denise Gardner is Assistant provost and Executive Director of Institutional Research and Analytics at Ut Knoxville

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Hester, Brian: and Justin Shepherd is Associate Vice Provost for Institutional Research and Decision support at Emory University

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Hester, Brian: panelists. I'll invite each of you to briefly introduce yourselves and share a line or 2 about the work your office is leading right now feel free to go in the same order that I introduced you in.

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Bridgette Decent: Thanks, Brian. I'm so happy to be here today and be able to talk to everybody about what I love, which is what I do. I've been at the University of Memphis for 15 years, and before that I was in Tallahassee, Florida. So, James, you're stomping grounds there

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Bridgette Decent: at Tallahassee Community college and institutional research there for 5 years. So I'm excited to be here today talking to everybody.

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Hester, Brian: James.

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James Hunt: Okay. I thought I was next. I was just gonna confirm. Well, good morning, everybody. As Brian said, I'm James Hunt. I am the Associate vice Provost chief data analytics officer here at Florida State. It's exciting to see. I didn't know I was gonna have so many Tallahassee and Fsu connections on the the call here today. But that's great. Yeah. I am excited to be here excited to talk with you all about some of the things we're doing at Fsu, and just some thoughts

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James Hunt: in terms of the Ir field in general. I am

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James Hunt: kind of like Bridget. Just get really excited about anything to do with data and you know how we can leverage the the data and the tools that we have and the skill sets that we have to, you know, really try to engage our our campuses in in how they're using data to better understand their students faculty and how, you know we could all kind of help everyone be more successful, so happy to be here, and looking forward to the conversation.

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Hester, Brian: Denise.

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Denise Gardner: Good morning, Denise Gardner. I'm ut Knoxville. I've been here for 13 years. I've been in the Ir, ie. Assessment world for over 30 years at various institutions, and I'm always excited to both. Be able to talk about the fun things that we're doing, not only in my current office, but knowing that what my colleagues are doing all around the southern region and the country, and I'm also excited to learn from these panelists as well those

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Denise Gardner: the folks that are here with us are well known in the field, and have done a lot of exciting things, and I think you're going to learn an awful lot.

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Hester, Brian: And Justin.

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Justin Shepherd: Hi, there, Justin Shepherd, I've been at Emory for 9 years. I'm the I'm the one of these is not like the other. I'm at a private institution. So I think it'll be fun to kind of share my my perspective with everyone. For the private or one perspective.

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Justin Shepherd: I'm also very excited to share, and I'm going to go ahead and do my 2 spoilers. I think the thing that I want to get out there, the takeaways for me are going to be

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Justin Shepherd: I think, Ir, as a profession is more about people than it is data. So I want to reinforce that up front. And the other thing is each of our data elements that we deal with is a student, a faculty member, staff member, an actual person whose lives that we're impacting. And I think it's important that we contextualize that and keep that at the forefront of our conversation, upfront.

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Hester, Brian: Thank you, Justin, and and thank you all for your your introductions. So let's go ahead and get started. Our 1st question

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Hester, Brian: is, how do you position, Ir, to stay relevant, informed, and connected.

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Bridgette Decent: And lead off here. I think this is such an important question. Especially since some of what we do in institutional research can often feel routine like there's ipads, reports, and fact books and reporting, and

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Bridgette Decent: all the thousands of external surveys that really never seem to end. There are ways to get beyond all of that and to stay relevant and connected. But it does require some effort and intentionality. So I've kind of thought about this, and I'm going to talk about 4 basic themes. First, st

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Bridgette Decent: we have to know our industry. So at the risk of aging myself as Gen. X. I'm going to start off with the usefulness of email so as much as I hate clearing up my inbox. I know that if I rely on my free time at work to go to websites to keep current. It's not going to happen. So I set up my email subscriptions to a variety of sources. I think a lot of us here know

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Bridgette Decent: these. I'll just mention them in case you don't chronicle of Higher Ed inside, higher ed UV newsletter, and then also look for association newsletters that you can subscribe to like shio and air.

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Bridgette Decent: Sometimes even vendor blogs can be a good source. I know we often get hounded by vendors, but sometimes they do send us useful content, useful information vendors like Helio, Campus and Eab. Those are 2 of the top ones that come to mind. I end up paying attention to some of what

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Bridgette Decent: they send me. And then, of course, there's social media. So if you have not turned off social media yet, you might be able to get a break from your doom scrolling by following some professional hashtags like hashtag institutional research, hashtag, higher Ed data. And then you can also set up Google alerts. This is what at times, where you're waiting for something to change, like the

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Bridgette Decent: gainful employment Regs to be published. I didn't want to have to keep checking the Federal Regs. But I knew I needed to know as soon as those those regulations were updated. So I set up a Google alert. So just knowing your industry, staying on top of it with all the the different sources out there is important.

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Bridgette Decent: I think. Secondly, you need to know your technology. We all know, institutional research is no longer just about static reports. We've got interactive dashboards. We've got predictive modeling. We've got data informed storytelling. So staying current means, we not only

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Bridgette Decent: adopt these new tools, but we also advocate for them. Internally. Some examples. Things like transitioning from excel to power bi or

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Bridgette Decent: exploring Apis for real time, data integration,

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Bridgette Decent: piloting generative AI for report summaries. When I showed my Deans the co-pilot feature and power bi to generate summaries of their data. It was like Christmas morning for them. They were so happy. We have to be early testers and translators of what these technologies can do for our campuses.

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Bridgette Decent: And I think it's important to know that this just doesn't happen organically, you have to make this happen. You have to invest in your own learning. So 30 min a week on Linkedin learning or coursera can add up, encourage your staff, give them time

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Bridgette Decent: to do this, I really like the Youtube videos, like power Bi's guy in a cube and and storytelling with data. Those are 2 of my favorites.

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Bridgette Decent: I think the 3rd thing that we have to do is is we have to know our environment.

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Bridgette Decent: as much as I'd like to bury my head in the sand and ignore the craziness of what's happening in the world. We do have to keep a pulse on the political and policy landscape, not just nationally, but also locally and institutionally. So

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Bridgette Decent: this means watching what's happening at board of trustees, city commission, State Legislature. Accreditation bodies. You name it just as an example. So at the University of Memphis, when the Ford blue oval plant started discussing Memphis as a possible location.

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Bridgette Decent: my office jumped in. We prepared an analysis of how the university could support their workforce education needs. And that went over really well. So just being connected to what's going on having your finger on the pulse of what's happening around you is really critical in order to stay relevant. I know we have

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Bridgette Decent: whiplash from trying to keep up with the Federal changes. But

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Bridgette Decent: decisions around funding and financial aid and Dei and workforce alignment. These, these all impact, the types of analysis that we're going to end up doing. And it's really best to be prepared and proactive.

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Bridgette Decent: And then finally, to sort of echo what? What? Justin said.

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Bridgette Decent: It's important to know your people so we can't stay in our silos. I strongly believe that

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Bridgette Decent: we've we've got to rely on our people resources. Part of this is is

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Bridgette Decent: doing what I call our Ir roadshow. So we regularly visit

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Bridgette Decent: departments, attend faculty senate meetings, set up listening tours with all of the various units from student affairs, academic affairs, enrollment services, all of the key players.

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Bridgette Decent: You have to be visible in order to be relevant. So I think it's important to advocate for a seat at the leadership tables, where you are not just there to present data, but actively engaging in conversation and ensuring that critical decisions are grounded in evidence and data, informed insights, and

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Bridgette Decent: I will say we also need to get out of our silos by attending conferences like this one and 10 air, which is August 6th through 8. It's not too late to register. And then present at those conferences. It helps build your network. And I fully believe that people are our best resources and can help in ways that data AI and other published sources just can't.

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Bridgette Decent: So yeah, that's my summary. Read as much as you can keep up with technology and politics. Get yourself out in front of as many people as you can. Talk about the great work that our profession does.

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Hester, Brian: Thanks, thanks, Bridget.

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James Hunt: Anybody else have. Yeah.

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James Hunt: I'll add to that and I. And I think this point also connects to the comment that Justin made his introduction about Ir. Really being a work about people.

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James Hunt: you know, to me when I think about

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James Hunt: kind of the the ir roadshow or taking the show on the road. The 1st thing that comes to my mind is what I would term data, literacy efforts or trainings, documentation. Those sorts of things around.

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James Hunt: You know, really about empowering folks on your campuses to work with data. So how do we as Ir

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James Hunt: analytics, offices, engage folks on our own campuses, not just in terms of giving them a report or giving them a dashboard. We're certainly going to do a lot of that. But how do we engage them in proactively teaching them how to use those tools or teaching them how to. You know how to read and interpret results, etc. And so I think to me one of the most important things that Ir.

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James Hunt: as a field, you know where it ways that it needs to evolve is that we've got to

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James Hunt: take a step and move beyond being the sole keeper of data. Right? I think at times we all were sitting on treasure troves of information. So we we've got to move beyond being that soul keeper of data and really shift our focus to being more about being an empowerment office. So how do we use the data to empower others? Other people to interact with the data, engage with the data.

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James Hunt: make sense of it, and ultimately use it to to make decisions and to take actions that are going to improve the experiences of their students and their faculty, etc. And so to me, when I think about trying to position Ir, to stay relevant and form connected to me. I think I totally agree with Bridget on all these other things, but I think, about the internally, at our institutions to stay connected. We do that through a lens of empowerment.

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Hester, Brian: Great.

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Hester, Brian: Thank you.

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Hester, Brian: Yeah, thank you both. You each touched on the importance of outreach and embedding Ir in in the campus culture. And yes, I think that is,

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Hester, Brian: not just being able to give access to the data, but making sure that it's being used used correctly is

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Hester, Brian: definitely. Something that I feel is is key on that. And

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Hester, Brian: would anybody else like to add a perspective on how they keep Ir connected in their environment.

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Hester, Brian: Denise. I know you do a lot of committee work and group engagement at Utk. Anything you'd like to share.

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Denise Gardner: The call. The our colleagues here have made a lot of really good points. It's you really do need to be connected on your campus as much as you can, and connected with your your close colleagues. If you're in a system, or others in the State or others. You know, trusted colleagues that you might have around the country. But but being in tune so that you can

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Denise Gardner: provide what folks are asking for, but also go outside the box and be proactive. And I think that's that's something we're sometimes hesitant to, or we don't have enough time to do. But it's it's good to try that every now and then.

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Hester, Brian: Alright. Thank you.

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Hester, Brian: All right.

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Hester, Brian: Our second question is, how can Ir serve as a neutral resource and still drive innovation?

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Hester, Brian: Denise, do you wanna pick up from where you were on that.

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Denise Gardner: Yes, that was an interesting question that you put on the list for us to to discuss, because you know, what does neutral resource mean? The definition is really going to depend on your campus administration, your leadership? What's their style? What's their preference? What's the culture at your particular institution? It used to be that an Ir office was

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Denise Gardner: mostly asked to be kind of neutral or Switzerland, which one of my my former directors would would tell me, because leaders needed time to kind of digest the information that you were giving them, the the research, the reports, the numbers, because they weren't necessarily getting them from anywhere else.

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Denise Gardner: Also you have your certain areas of inquiry, such as your politically sensitive, or you know your broad areas like your strategic or master planning such that people need needed more time to digest. We didn't have as much data driven decision making in the past, and as it's become much more prevalent, much more needed.

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Denise Gardner: Figuring out how to work with your leaders is the biggest, the biggest thing. Sometimes you're going to be asked directly for recommendations. Sometimes you're going to be asked just to state the facts. You need to know your audience. You need to know what they're really asking. If you've had a lot of interaction with them, particularly upper leaders. Then you're going to know their style and know what they're looking for. So it's very much going to be dependent upon your to me, your your institutional leadership and style

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Denise Gardner: driving innovation. Yes, again, like I said a minute ago. Sometimes we'll make that time to be a little more proactive is to say, you know, I heard this at the board of trustees meeting. I think you're probably going to get some questions. Here's some information, or here's some some resources we could pass along sometimes, you can, you know, especially if you have those relationships that'll be well received.

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Denise Gardner: I think Justin's got a got a different perspective in part, because again, the places places that he has worked in the interactions that he's had.

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Hester, Brian: Right. Yes, I remember that, Justin. Do you want to share that one.

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Justin Shepherd: Yeah. The the great part about this is actually Denise and I,

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Justin Shepherd: are part of the same lineage of of ir, of Ir training. So the interesting thing I think for me is, I have very quickly in in my roles.

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Justin Shepherd: abandoned this idea of Switzerland, and I think the reason being is a couple of the things that I emphasize is that number one. Ir is not a data provider. Okay? Like, I reinforce this over and over that. We are not a data provider. We are doing social science behavioral research. We are taking data from many different areas and combining it in such a way that we are understanding a holistic view of the student from academic.

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Justin Shepherd: from applicant social campus life

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Justin Shepherd: engagements all the way through to a graduate and and alumni that is hopefully giving us money, right? So there's so much of this that goes into it that I try to avoid us being thinking of data as data or a cross tab or a table.

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Justin Shepherd: And so what that means is because we have such a wide scope of of area of knowledge. It means that we really are experts, and we know a lot more about the full student lifecycle than many other people on campus.

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Justin Shepherd: So to James's point, earlier. It empowers us in our office and our staff to actually make those recommendations and say, Hey, we've been keeping up with all of the news that Bridget was talking about, we follow, we read. And so we know in advance that when we're talking about travel bans.

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Justin Shepherd: how that could impact our admissions, how that could impact our yield, how that could impact our retention. And here are some things that we can do about it. Here's how we're going to engage with the Deans and the chief, but business officers and with our global engagement community to kind of address these issues, because we're the only ones that have all of those different data connections. So for us.

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Justin Shepherd: we really have pivoted away from being a data provider and a neutral source to one that is a trusted source of recommendations, not just a neutral source of objectivity.

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Hester, Brian: Okay, well, that's yes, that's

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Hester, Brian: really interesting. It makes me wonder, Justin, how do you know how to balance? If that's the right word to balance that, or or how far to take that that

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Hester, Brian: prescriptive analytics recommendations? Is it up to a certain point that you've gotten accustomed to? What would you say to that.

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Justin Shepherd: I I get in trouble constantly is what I say to that. but but I'm okay with that, right? Like, I, I think there is such a thing as good trouble. Right? We, we need to push the thinking. We need to

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Justin Shepherd: push our senior leadership to consider different angles or different perspectives or different viewpoints, especially if you're at an institution where people have been there for 2025, 30, long periods of time, they may not be as up to date on things in the field or tools or techniques. And I know later in the presentation, we're going to talk more about this, but

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Justin Shepherd: trying to explain the black box. That is AI, that we're dumping information. And yet we're getting all these miraculous answers out. That is not something that we can explain in detail. That is something that we have to talk to non technical people.

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Justin Shepherd: about really advanced methodologies. And so building that relationship going back to the people going back to the Trust. That's really how we do it. And I've tripped on occasion. But

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Justin Shepherd: if you focus on the people part you can ask for for forgiveness. You can build that relationship. You can build that report to where you know who's going to be welcome to your recommendations, and who's not.

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Bridgette Decent: Right. Yes, I'll jump in and and say that.

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Bridgette Decent: I can.

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Bridgette Decent: I can see both sides of it. So I I can. I've been at the University through 4 Presidents in my tenure here, and each one has been slightly different in terms of their expectations, and what they will accept from Ir. And it has ranged from, you know. Please tell me what the data says to please don't tell me what the data says, and everything in between. So

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Bridgette Decent: in Ir, we're sort of the helping profession we have to adapt to the needs of our customers and our institution while still holding true to the values of our profession. So everything that Justin said so you know, being the advocate for pulling different disparate sources of data together and making them useful and accessible. And and, you know, transforming through actual data, informed

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Bridgette Decent: points and things like that. So I think, along with what Justin says, I will say that the more we show what Ir can do, and the more that we can connect the data in valuable ways, even through this transition of leadership. I've seen the more that Ir has become the trusted source, and the more that Ir is asked for insights and not just show me the data. So

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Bridgette Decent: it's a little bit of a balancing act. I think you have to understand your administration. What what their expectations are. Work with that. And and you know. Push where you can, but understand where you can't.

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Denise Gardner: Thank you.

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Denise Gardner: Those relationships going exactly what we were saying in the prior conversation.

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Denise Gardner: You just have to. You just have to make those connections in the best way you can, you know. Start, start small, start with who you report to, or casual conversations work it into. Oh, goodness! We've got this big issue going. I have some information

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Denise Gardner: or some perspective to offer, and try to just sort of put your way in there. I was kind of glancing through the, you know the comments and the questions here in the chat, and it can be hard. It does depend on the culture, and it also depends on your personality. If it's not you. Someone else in your office may have an interest in or a better perspective, and be able to explain things. Get those folks out in front of you.

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Hester, Brian: Yes, I mean, sometimes we need to give ourselves credit for like Justin mentioned knowing these different functional areas and how how they're related.

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Hester, Brian: And and yeah, be brave. A lot of times, I think. Justin also mentioned about the trust and like Bridget, had talked about new new leadership coming in. And and yeah, often they may have. One may lean one way versus another, but it probably also just takes some time for that trust to develop. So

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Hester, Brian: yeah, sounds like it's a it's a

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Hester, Brian: worth being proactive. But be patient.

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Hester, Brian: Alright. Well, I think that was a good discussion on that question.

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Hester, Brian: what you know. I think that

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Hester, Brian: There's a difference between neutral versus being passive, and you know what each of you said is that neutrality isn't about silence. It's it's about clarity, objectivity and trust.

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Hester, Brian: And when those are in place, Ir can absolutely lead innovation.

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Hester, Brian: So question 3 is, how is your institution using data to respond to ambiguity or change?

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Hester, Brian: James? I think that was.

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James Hunt: That was me. I was trying to finish the the chats on fire here. So we've been having good conversation off to the side. But yeah, I I would say, as far as how

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James Hunt: we respond to ambiguity and change. I mean, we could have a whole panel on just everything that's going on but

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James Hunt: to me. I honestly think that we respond to ambiguity, uncertainty, and change by doubling down on the work that we're already doing you know, we're in terms of using data and helping and empowering folks to use data. There's still a need for that. And one could argue an even greater need for that. You know, we need data to sort of tell our

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James Hunt: our story and and it's particularly in a time and environment where the value of higher education, the impact of higher education is being questioned. I think we need to have factual information to help us tell that story. And so at Fsu.

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James Hunt: You know it. I've talked about in the chat. And previously, you know, we we really are working to foster this culture of of data engagement across the university. And so we're

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James Hunt: you know, we're trying to prioritize making data approachable. More approachable and actionable is part, you know part and parcel with the data literacy efforts. And then you also get into just your your kind of dashboards and tools that you provide to help folks work collaboratively around data. So I, I think

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James Hunt: part of that. And what I think is really critical to how we respond to ambiguity and change is that ir analytics, ie. Have got to move beyond just producing these static reports and kind of like, I said earlier, we we've really got to be actively engaged with decision makers to help frame the different questions that we're needing to explore and test our different assumptions to iterate different solutions.

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James Hunt: We've got to be. It's not just to produce up. Here's a fact book. Here's a static report. We had this end of the story. We've got to be this in this constant evolving back and forth with our stakeholders, be it senior leadership, or folks in an academic advising office, or sort of everything in between, to try to really home what we're we're producing to aid them in the work they're doing or the decisions they need to make.

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James Hunt: And so to me, it kind of goes back to that. That sort of people approach and collaboration focus that it's through collaboration that I think we can ensure that we're getting timely insights. Things are contextualized. We all know that data without context is really just garbage. Right? So we've got to maintain context with our data. And so I think

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James Hunt: through that collaboration we can really work to make sure that our our kind of data efforts within Ir are going to be directly tied to whatever these constantly changing, emerging institutional challenges and priorities may be.

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Hester, Brian: Right? Right? And then you mentioned, I think, something in there about just not giving one, but giving multiple perspectives, multiple options. And Denise, you've mentioned the use of scenario modeling at Utk. Could you share a quick example of how your team is helping leaders

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Hester, Brian: prepare for uncertainty?

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Denise Gardner: I didn't mention that directly. But we

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Denise Gardner: it. It depends on how you're able to have those conversations and which which relationships you've been able to build and you know who is going there. So I mean, I've I'm fortunate enough. We have a fairly large staff here in the Ursa office, and

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Denise Gardner: we have some folks that have, you know, great expertise. We have a new analyst who's very interested in AI, and so getting those informations out there. Those expertise is out there getting those questions asked, getting people in in particular meetings

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Denise Gardner: doing trainings like we're doing here. We're also doing a lot of finally, a lot of good workaround data governance and working with lots of colleagues across campus to get

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Denise Gardner: some things formalized and things really out there and and been able to change the the data structures here, we're moving to power bi. So we're rewriting a lot of things. We're getting a lot of input on that. And we have a data user community that we're starting to work with. So a lot of the things that that

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Denise Gardner: that the other panelists have been talking about. We've been doing a little more piecemeal here, and we're now able to to get those further out there, and that will lead to just better and better relationships and and discussions and hopefully decisions by our upper administration.

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Hester, Brian: Thanks, right, you know. And I feel like, as James noted this, these, the changes and the ambiguity. It's really it affects all of us, and it's just so widespread and and

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Hester, Brian: and overarching, I'm sure. Do, Bridget Justin, do you either of you have anything that you could share from your your perspectives?

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Bridgette Decent: I think, in terms of dealing with uncertainty and change. The the comforting thing is that even even when there is change or ambiguity or uncertainty. It's usually not something that's a hundred percent brand new. So

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Bridgette Decent: you know, we take the example of the pandemic when everything shut down in person. Classes were suspended. We still had data to help us with our decision makings. We had data on, you know, remote learning. We knew what worked well, what didn't. We knew how to? We had our data on spaces, so we knew how to find spaces in order to socially distance classrooms, and that for people that had to be in person.

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Bridgette Decent: We we

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Bridgette Decent: we had data from, you know, Lms systems. So we knew how to monitor student engagement to make sure that this social isolation isolation, wasn't, you know, really harming students in a in an academic way, try to intervene where we could. So I would say.

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Bridgette Decent: you know, don't become the deer in the headlights when when ambiguity or change or something happens, just, you know. Rely on on your expertise, and we've we've got structures in place. We just need to sort of pivot how we're using them, what we'll be creative in terms of what we can do to use that in order to to answer pressing questions.

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Hester, Brian: Thank you.

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Justin Shepherd: I'll I'll go ahead and jump into, because I think for us as well. Being a private institution. It's we. We've had a lot of of challenges recently. And I and I do think there's a difference between between ambiguity

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Justin Shepherd: change

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Justin Shepherd: and almost kind of what's happening right now. Chaos, because, like a lot of, I think what we deal with in Ir is ambiguity. We'll get a question. How many students do we have? How many faculty do we have. And then we have to figure out like, what are you actually trying to answer? What's the proper definition? What is the proper data governance? What is the proper data source, etc, etc. So that's ambiguity.

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Justin Shepherd: Change is tough and has been increasing at a very rapid pace. The change management needed in higher education, just because we've seen tenures of senior leadership shrink dramatically over the last 10 years, right? Like it's now a 3 to 5 year cycle for senior leaders much more similar to private enterprise than it was previously. When you would have a president or a chancellor for 15 plus years.

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Justin Shepherd: That's not happening anymore. So that's that's also challenging to to deal with.

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Justin Shepherd: But both of those, I think, can be contextualized. And there are strategies to deal with it. The other stuff like what's happening right now is is super challenging. Because for us at Emory we're looking at a 450 million dollars deficit because of all of the Federal policy changes and taxes on endowments and all like the research spending. And we're a huge medical center. Everything else that is coming.

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Justin Shepherd: That is, that is transpired recently. This is unprecedented, and that is where I really kind of work with my staff to

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Justin Shepherd: essentially build resilience right? Like we have to really focus on core mission. We have to focus on each other. We have to focus on self-care. So it's much more, I think, than than what we've seen historically, that what we are kind of working with right now is is really kind of teaching ourselves that resilience and focusing on the core foundation, focusing on the work, focusing on what keeps us grounded.

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Hester, Brian: Thanks, and yes, thanks to each of you.

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Hester, Brian: it feels like we're hearing a theme of Ir serving as an anchor in chaotic times and not just reporting on the change, but guiding the response. And

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Hester, Brian: this reminds me of the air report. Many of us read recently about the impacts of potential changes to the Us. Department of Ed that that study found. I think it was 81% of ir, ie. Professionals saw data, disruption and policy instability as serious risks which highlights the importance of clarity and consistency that we could bring in.

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Hester, Brian: especially when external systems are shifting.

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Hester, Brian: so our last question, what does collaboration really look like in your context? And what makes it work?

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Hester, Brian: Oh, Bridget, I feel like I remember you had

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Hester, Brian: before something to say on this topic.

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Bridgette Decent: Sure I can. I can jump in so I think collaboration to me. It's as the theme has been throughout this whole conversation is, it's really all about the people. So it's it's

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Bridgette Decent: connecting with those external to your institution as well as those within your institution. When it comes to those within your institution, it's it's it's

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Bridgette Decent: meeting the end users where they are. Some of them want interactive dashboards. Others want their spoon fed bullet points. So I think it's it's just willing to have that adaptiveness, that flexibility, in order to to change whatever your report or dashboard or presentation or whatever it is, shows in response to your your end user feedback, we, we really have to value the expertise of who it is that we're working with.

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Bridgette Decent: We we as institutional research professionals, we, we

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Bridgette Decent: we we are kind of seen as that. You know, we have all of the data which, as mentioned. We're trying to get away from that but we we don't want it to be just that we want it to be

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Bridgette Decent: teaching. We want it to be interactive. We want it to be collaborative.

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Bridgette Decent: We want to make sure that people see us as a trusted resource. And I think

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Bridgette Decent: I think collaboration happens when we take time away, somehow find time to carve away from compliance. So be proactive in answering those questions that we know will be helpful. So I started off talking about, you know, being informed all the different ways that you can be informed. And so it is really important if you. If you see something, try to be ready with some analysis that's going to be helpful for the conversation, because sometimes the conversations don't wait

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Bridgette Decent: and

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Bridgette Decent: and also just know that it's I think somebody mentioned in the chat that numbers are not just numbers. There's stories behind them, and I think maybe James started off, or Justin started off, saying, It's it's not not just about

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Bridgette Decent: a number. There's somebody behind it, a person, a human being. So you make those connections between your different data sources. And you don't just report retention rates. But you talk about analyzing which students are leaving, and why and and things like that so suddenly. When you expose all of this information, you connect it. People trust you. They want to work with you. So I think that's really the spirit of collaboration and institutional research.

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Hester, Brian: Yeah, thanks. Bridget.

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Hester, Brian: James, I imagine you've seen some cross institutional collaboration that that stands out from you know your role as sayer President. Anything there that that jumps out that you'd you'd want to share.

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James Hunt: Yeah, I, I think cross institutional collaboration on

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James Hunt: any possible front is is incredibly helpful. And what I mean by that is

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James Hunt: from a Sarah perspective. Having an opportunity to

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James Hunt: connect with colleagues, meet colleagues, engage conversation with colleagues, maybe even give presentations, build some relationships with folks, is helpful on so many fronts. Certainly not the least of which is that when I've got an issue and I don't, I'm I don't know how to handle something, or I've got something that you think for in your mind. Oh, my gosh! This is such a uniquely Florida or Florida state thing! And yes, I live in Florida, and I realize we're an interesting state these days. But

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James Hunt: nevertheless, I would wager that there's very little, if not nothing, that we're experiencing, that I don't have a colleague somewhere that they haven't dealt with, so I can pick up the phone. I can call Justin. I can call Denise. I can call Bridget. I can call other folks and and get their perspective. You know, being a part of of different kind of smaller groups. List serves with with folks being able to interact. I think it's just it's just hugely helpful to the the work that we do. And so.

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James Hunt: sare is an organization. I think that does a good job of helping to cultivate connections like that. And I know all of the State groups. The Tennessee group among them does the same. And so I know we'd said that earlier about the value of getting involved with those groups. But you know I couldn't agree more, and I would say, too, and I realize I'm on. We're on a call here, a panel here with

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James Hunt: folks in the ut system, and I in the Florida system have had. Some of my best professional kind of connections with colleagues at the other schools in our State system. Here in Florida we have a.

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James Hunt: Every institution in the State of Florida has a person who is appointed to be that institution's quote unquote data administrator, which is the one who has to kind of sign off and certify submissions to the state. And so

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James Hunt: our group of data administrators meets on a generally about a quarterly basis typically in person. We'll do some kind of hybrid as well. But being able to maintain relationships with the you know the Me. At at University of Florida University of West Florida or South Florida at all the institutions in the State. It's it's just incredibly incredibly helpful because we're you know. There again you have a set of colleagues that are

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James Hunt: dealing with some of the same kinds of challenges that that you are, and certainly in a state context where you may have more nuanced challenges to your State. That's a great group of colleagues to rely on, to try to work through challenges that you come across.

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Hester, Brian: Yes, thanks. Yeah. And I do feel also that we we discover that here in our system, wide meetings when we bring up issues. Justin Denise, I'd love to hear your take on what makes collaboration work well, or or where it sometimes gets stuck.

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Denise Gardner: I was going to add a couple things.

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Denise Gardner: one is, you know, air has a term, and others have a term called integrated institutional effectiveness which means you work with your colleagues

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Denise Gardner: across campus. So if you're an ir shop, you make sure you stay in touch with the other components of, ie. Your assessment folks, your strategic planning folks, your accreditation folks, because you're you're sometimes answering the same questions, or all the perspectives can come together. And I think that's very important to to have those conversations, but also to make sure your leaders are aware of that, that you are aware that what's done in the assessment arena, and

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Denise Gardner: something that Ir has been studying or working with your

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Denise Gardner: student affairs, or student success on understanding how to help our students. It all come can come together very much in your policy.

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Denise Gardner: discussions and decisions. And then the other thing I was going to say is a good example of collaboration within the institution for us has been the last couple of years when we had new Oit leadership come in, and it's the same leadership for the system. As for our campus right now, and so they've been driving a lot of innovation, and they have worked a lot with us. And so we have

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Denise Gardner: for our office, been able to take those census data sets. We're bringing them into a new structure. We're doing like I said, changing to power bi dashboards. We're bringing together today the data community, we're doing data, literacy data, dictionaries. We're getting a lot of things out there. But we could not be doing all of that without the collaboration of our oit colleagues. And so it's important to use those relationships that you have across campus as well.

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Denise Gardner: You may have the expertise in your office. I've been in a place where that's been the case, but it's not currently. And we definitely need to rely on our colleagues.

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Justin Shepherd: Yeah, I'm I mean, everything that y'all have said is is absolutely true.

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Justin Shepherd: I am. I'm I'm gonna take a slightly different perspective, though

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Justin Shepherd: not everything, is always collaborative. Right? There are just some difficult people to work with across campus or difficult offices, and I do think we need to be honest about that. Right? Like we can. We can list off all of these positive success stories and things. But I'm glad that your it department is so supportive of you, I can't really say the same thing. And I know we're being recorded. And that's okay.

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Justin Shepherd: so I I do think there are different ways to approach it. I think we have to, you know, again.

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Justin Shepherd: recognize

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Justin Shepherd: the different units across campus and the dynamics and the personalities that's always going to be in play. But at the same time, too, I do think our work and what we do is very critical to the institution, and at the end of the day. We are

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Justin Shepherd: official representatives in many ways of the institution, whether it be compliance or rankings, or other cases, and so there may be times that we actually have to create that good trouble that I was talking about and sit there and say, No, no, I'm I'm actually the expert on this. I'm the ipads key holder.

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Justin Shepherd: This is the way that we do it. I'm working with internal audit. I'm working with general counsel. I'm working with, you know. So there are times that it may not feel collaborative.

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Justin Shepherd: And that's okay. Because at the end of the day we do have to protect the institution, and a lot of what we do, whether we know it or not is actually risk management and risk mitigation, because we are telling stories with data. And there's inappropriate ways of doing that. And we have to protect the institution from that.

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James Hunt: Yeah, I would totally agree with that.

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James Hunt: and you know, certainly. For us, with that, me serving as that institutional data administrator role.

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James Hunt: You know, there is an expectation that's given to me from senior leadership that we have to be in compliance. Right? And so if that means we're in compliance through a friendly seeing Kumbaya and submit some data sort of a setting awesome. That's great. But if we, you know, if I need to ensure compliance by.

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James Hunt: you know, letting somebody know that they're gonna need to do something a certain way. Then that's what we're gonna have to do, too, because at the end of the day, that that the institutions, funding and reputation are at stake with this sort of stuff, and we, you know, is is the goal is always to be collaborative and to, to, you know. Make sure that we're we're engaging folks in the best way that we can. But, there are times not as many, but there are times where the rubbers got to meet the road, and we have to be prepared to manage that.

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Hester, Brian: Right. Well, I I yes, I know that there's

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Hester, Brian: always situations where certain offices may want it to, not not look a certain way, or or the

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Hester, Brian: temptation to sugarcoat. But where does that really? Where does that get the university in the long run?

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Bridgette Decent: I'm just gonna say 2 words faculty Senate.

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Hester, Brian: Yes, shared governance.

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Hester, Brian: Well, alright those were our questions that we had had planned to talk about. I I feel it was a really rich conversation. I appreciate how honest you were about. You know both the power and complexity of collaboration. And then and then these other topics that we had talked on.

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Hester, Brian: Any last thoughts that you know before we turn it over to the Q. And A.

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Hester, Brian: Well, I feel like we did.

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Hester, Brian: We did cover a lot, and so maybe there'll be more that comes that that come up in the questions. So we have a few minutes now, and Ashley and Rachel are helping to monitor that. So take it away.

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Ashley Ludewig: Absolutely thank you all so much for that great conversation, and we do have a couple of questions in the chat, and I think they'll lead to to, maybe even more discussion, as Brian was saying. And so the 1st one that we got earlier, I saw a lot of you guys unpacking this in the chat, but

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Ashley Ludewig: transitioning or sort of moving something beyond a 1 time training model to these sorts of long term engagements. And so I know we've got a couple of things that that Justin and James dropped in there, but I just wanted to to open that up a little bit and see what else you guys might add to moving from this sense of, we can go teach them this one thing for this one asset, or whatever it might be to that bigger model. And Justin and James, if you maybe have something you could share to us about the trial and error of how that's gone for you all.

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James Hunt: I'll start. I think trial and error is a great word. Because it's certainly a lot of that. We some of our training efforts. I guess a little bit of the backstories. It really began with

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James Hunt: when Fsu, probably

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James Hunt: probably about 10 or 12 years ago, 12 years ago we had changed to convert it to a new Erp, and then had rolled out a an oracle business intelligence tool the institution did, and Ir at the time

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James Hunt: just sort of became, and I'm not even sure exactly how this came to be. But it was a a fortuitous thing that it happened became sort of designated as the department that was going to train

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James Hunt: users across campus. And how to use that tool. And the the kicker was is that if you as a user on campus, wanted access to the various data sets that would come out of the tool. You had to go to the training right? So we started doing these bi trainings

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James Hunt: and years ago, it really just as a service to the campus. And that's how folks would get access to the different data sets in the tool and but as time went on, you know, we as as we've kind of discussed here right? Ir, folks tend to be a little bit techy in nature and kind of can live on that sort of cutting edge of wanting to explore new tools. And you know, early adopters into new things.

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James Hunt: You know, we found ourselves heavily invested in power. Bi, also. Then, even getting into other like Microsoft products, like teams and planner, and some of those tools that you know we had access to. And

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James Hunt: as as get these collaborative sort of relationships with different folks on campus would would come along. You know, we would get people asking us questions to say, like, Hey, you know, we we see this power bi thing. But and you guys are doing some cool stuff with it. We'd really love to learn a little bit about it. Huh? Okay, well, let's see if we can put together a little training. So we put together a training. And it's like, well.

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James Hunt: wow! Just 1 4 h training is nowhere near enough to get through all the content we need to get through. So maybe we need to have 2 days of power bi training. So we split it and create a second day, and then we do that for a while, and it's well. Gosh! There's too much to get through in 2 days. Maybe we should add a 3rd day to, you know, almost like a 1 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 3 0 1!

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James Hunt: And then somewhere along the way, one of the folks on my team realizes that there were people coming to power bi training who had absolutely 0 understanding of like. And I don't mean this to be judgmental, but just a practical issue. They had no understanding of kind of basic data structure. So even from like an excel perspective, what is a row? What is a column.

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James Hunt: Well, we can't teach you how to write Dax and run power. Query if you don't know what a row and a column is, right. So maybe we should create an Excel training. And so some of that was just kind of meeting folks where they are, as we would sort of again. Trial and error, go through and realize, you know, and learn like kind of what folks are are needing in order to be, you know, effective in their work, and so

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James Hunt: expanded into doing teams, trainings. And so we've long story short, we've gone from just doing those oracle bi trainings to now, having

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James Hunt: just a rather large calendar of of different trainings that we offer. I'm needing to hire someone to help manage

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James Hunt: are scheduling up these trainings and the the number of attendees folks that we're training has just has increased tenfold in the last 5 years. And it's and I think it's just because it's this sort of fluid evolving. And and some of that's by design. It has to evolve. The technology is evolving. I mean, even power bi.

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James Hunt: Now, versus when we started doing power bi trainings a couple of years ago looks and feels different. So we have to adapt. And so I think that's just it. Just sort of has snowballed, I guess, is what I would say.

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Justin Shepherd: And I would, I would add on to that that ultimately, I think what you're trying to do is not host trainings.

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Justin Shepherd: Ultimately what you're trying to do is build a culture of data literacy. And so your office doesn't always have to be the one that's responsible for that. You know, the Ir shop at Fsu is one of the best in the country. So that's amazing. They have certificate programs they've got, you know. So they have the resources to do it. But if you don't.

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Justin Shepherd: you can do a grassroots and create this type of structure just by kind of thinking of it as a cultural shift and cross training and collaboration rather than a formalized training program.

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Bridgette Decent: I will echo that

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Bridgette Decent: we're pretty small Ir shop here. And we did start off doing those formal, you know, power bi trainings. We would offer them every month, and people would sign up, and you know they were attended pretty well at

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Bridgette Decent: the beginning, and then attend this kind of dropped off, as the people who are most interested had already gotten trained. And I will say, in our power bi sessions, we are teaching people how to use institutional research power bi data, not learning how to, you know, write backs and create data models and all that kind of stuff.

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Bridgette Decent: but we have since. We still offer those monthly trainings, but we found that it's it's more useful sometimes to be a just in time resource. So we do. In addition to our monthly trainings, have weekly drop in sessions. We we do, you know, lunch and learn. It's an old concept, but it still works, so that when somebody has a question that they're specifically trying to answer at that moment

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Bridgette Decent: they can jump in and get, you know, one on one attention in order to help them. And we do advocate for that sort of data culture train the trainer type of model. So we say, you know, please share this with your colleagues and and sort of form that network in that way, just because we don't have a lot of resources.

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Ashley Ludewig: Yeah, thank you all for that.

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Ashley Ludewig: Another question that we got was

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Ashley Ludewig: how to identify the right quote unquote people to be connecting with. So this has really been a theme. Finding the people who need you on your campus, and vice versa, finding the people that you need, maybe externally to connect with. I know we got a quick Linkedin drop here. To be like this is a good start, but broadly. How do you all approach that sort of you don't know what you don't know. So how have you made the right connections on your campuses, or professionally? And what advice would you give.

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Justin Shepherd: So I'm I'm actually gonna piggyback off of a another comment that I made in the chat, which is about kind of the cold calling right? I think

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Justin Shepherd: finding the people that want to connect with you

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Justin Shepherd: is is also really important because you do cool stuff right? Like, I just don't want to do ipads over and over like, I don't want that to be my everyday like I want to have something like fun and new, and I'm learning about something interesting that I hadn't learned about last year.

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Justin Shepherd: And so I think for me, like knowing when new people start or when there's an appetite, or when there's some sort of assessment or accreditation coming up gives me the opportunity to kind of get my foot in the door, and then I can say, Hey, look at the cool stuff that we've done for other people. Look at how we helped chemistry redo their curriculum. Look at how we're helping Ncaa athletics.

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Justin Shepherd: And so I can use these examples to sit there and say, you're the expert on 1st generation and low income students. You need to be dealing with students.

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Justin Shepherd: Let me handle the data handling. Let me handle the paperwork. Let me handling all the stuff that you're doing in excel, because that's not where you want to be spending your time. You want to be spending your time helping students. So you do that. Give me your data set. I can produce something like this, like I did for other colleagues across campus. And everybody's happy because you're doing what you're good at. And I'm doing what I'm good at, and we're benefiting the institution and the students directly that way.

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Ashley Ludewig: Any other thoughts on how you've identified the right people on your campuses, or maybe made unlikely connections that have that have turned out to be fruitful for you.

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James Hunt: I think listening is important. So I think about

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James Hunt: I'm you know, if I'm attending

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James Hunt: larger meetings or events. You know we we do a Fsu does a twice a year.

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James Hunt: all deans and all department chairs gathering, meeting so big group and

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James Hunt: I I attend those whether I'm I'm presenting anything or not. And a lot of it is is that I'm listening either indirectly, to conversations and questions that they're having to senior leadership, or I'm just having conversation, direct conversation with folks there, and I I think the more that you can listen and kind of hear and understand where people are, the more you can start to find sort of common threads of Hey, this is something that

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James Hunt: you know the physics chair is is really concerned about and trying to track this aspect of faculty research productivity. And you know, we've had this ongoing conversation with the Vice President of research about needing better data on the similar sort of thing. I wonder if there's some alignment here of something we could do together. And so to me, a lot of it is just just trying to be present and look for those moments where you can.

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James Hunt: You can see the beginning of some synergy for what could be a project? Because I think that's where some of that

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James Hunt: that that's where some of that collaboration could really evolve is around a sort of a shared project that could be helpful, useful for a a variety of parties.

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Ashley Ludewig: Yeah, I love that. That's like it's great advice.

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Ashley Ludewig: Sort of a similar theme here. Speaking of sharing what we're doing, we've got one question in the chat, which is, how do you all share what you're doing, so that others are not starting at a ground level when a solution exists, for example, dashboards. And so.

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Ashley Ludewig: you know, everybody is maybe building their 1st dashboards at some point. But there's probably someone on their campus before. So what kinds of sharing and and collaboration. Are you all doing around that kind of work?

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Denise Gardner: Well, I'll I'll give one example. You know, I mentioned earlier about the university changing over to power Bi, and

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Denise Gardner: you know it's driven by the the new oit leadership. And how we're, you know, we're have a more collaborative environment and working together.

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Denise Gardner: But we're

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Denise Gardner: We still got silos, you know, we got this particular unit. Oh, we all of a sudden learned that they're doing these amazing things with power Bi, or we need to learn from each other. So we're working. You know, we're working to try to keep those connections. We're working with our upper leadership and the Oit group to get some, some formalization around. What? What is data governance? And who?

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Denise Gardner: What groups are going to be in charge, quote unquote of what and how are we going to get those things disseminated across campus? And how are we going to get the communication out? You know, going to those academic leadership meetings? I do the same. Sometimes we get to present, sometimes we're there to listen. I listen in on Faculty Senate when I can. I listen to the board of trustees meetings when when those come about, not just to

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Denise Gardner: to look at the particular numbers that are there, but to hear what the President or the Chancellor, or the the enrollment. Strategic plans are and listen to all those kinds of things. So we can then think about how to

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Denise Gardner: proactively, help or provide some some information, or to get those conversations going across and then working with the data users across campus. As I mentioned before, as well as part of that data governance is getting those collaborations going, getting those trainings and learnings, and setting up and learning from each other, as well.

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Bridgette Decent: And I will say we record as much as we can in terms of trainings, and we put them out on our portal so that

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Bridgette Decent: anybody on campus can access them at any time. Just because, you know, we've got limited time, and we can't always be having the same conversation with the same users on how to get started and and things like that. So technology is your friend in terms of sharing what you do. And then, if people have specific questions, that's when your time can be used, more valuable.

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Ashley Ludewig: Okay.

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Ashley Ludewig: See, you've got one more question, and

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Ashley Ludewig: it says it's kind of a bigger, broad question I'd love to maybe hear from each of you on this? What does the future of data sharing or data access look like in higher education in a potentially post ipads world.

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Ashley Ludewig: So thinking really broadly about our connections. What do you guys see? And how will you approach it?

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Ashley Ludewig: Get your crystal balls out.

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Justin Shepherd: Guys.

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Bridgette Decent: I see hints of it in things that are already happening, you know, voluntary data sharing for the benefit of all so national student Clearinghouse. None of us have to do it, but we all do it because it benefits us all

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Bridgette Decent: same thing with within the State of Tennessee. We've been working with Tec in order to form partnerships with the post-secondary education outcome opportunities. So where we're getting labor and wage data from other sources outside of the State of Tennessee, so State of Tennessee, voluntarily reporting into that data system so that we can then extract data.

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Bridgette Decent: that entire system that benefits us all. That is one way that it could go, not saying that it that it will. My! My crystal ball is pretty murky.

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Justin Shepherd: I I would just say it's it's something that I've been thinking about for a number of years. With the higher education, reauthorization, conversations that come up and down every now and then. You know even even

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Justin Shepherd: this idea of of post ipads. But let's just say that we do end up with a unit record submission system. Right? Well, we don't need ipads anymore because they don't need aggregate information. It's basically nipsas to the nth degree. So I there are different things that that could happen. I think this goes back to our full conversation, though

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Justin Shepherd: ipads is one report, and if Ir focuses on reporting and being a data provider, we will fail.

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Justin Shepherd: We are not that though we are much more about people and storytelling and providing tools and resources and different ways of looking at the data, and ultimately, at the end of the day, our goal is to enhance the student.

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Justin Shepherd: The research, the Public Service Mission of the Institution. And we have to have data to do that. We have to know what's working and what's not working. And so I do think that there will continue to be that, and then, you know, just to slide it in there. There's also still rankings. So you know us news is not going anywhere. So we're still going to have to do this anyway.

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James Hunt: Justin. We made it this far without talking about.

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Justin Shepherd: I know, made it this far.

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Denise Gardner: Be interesting to see what changes with Bob Morse retiring. But I agree rankings won't go away, or even more, even beyond us news. But how do we put those kind of things, you know, help people put those kind of things in context. How do we go beyond that? How do we think about

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Denise Gardner: publicizing the good things that we're doing. You know, we've been able to do that a lot here as being the flagship in the State of Tennessee. But we're part of a system, and we have great system leadership as well and great system, ie. Colleagues. So we we work well together in a lot of this.

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Ashley Ludewig: Any final thoughts? That was our last question. Please anyone in the group feel free to also unmute. If you have a question, you just didn't have a chance to pop in the chat

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Ashley Ludewig: given. Appropriate teacher. Silence here before passing it off.

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Jorge Perez: Thank you for that comment, Denise, about system colleagues. One thing that I would like to ask you, all of you is

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Jorge Perez: a distinctive competency that the ie. Team here in the Ut system has leaned into is visualization of data. We realized when we were formed as a team, that that sort of last step to make the data available to decision makers in a more robust or sophisticated way was going to make a big difference. And so we have a data visualization specialist on the team.

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Jorge Perez: And we are hiring the director of data design and visualization. We're really leaning into that competency quite a lot more. How do you see that playing out? We made a presentation at Sare last year about that the focus of a graphic designer essentially on our team. Do you see that as something that is going to continue to expand in the Ir area? Or how has that played out at your particular campuses?

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Denise Gardner: I'll let the others. I'll let the others speak. I mean Justin.

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Denise Gardner: I think it was just mentioned that that Florida state is definitely one of the leaders of Nir, and they are in many, many ways. But they're also one of the leaders in the in the data visualization as we're doing our dashboards. We've looked extensively at theirs. But, Bridget, we've been looking recently at some of your things as well, and we all can learn from each other. If you're fortunate enough to have the resources to have the staff to have someone that can just focus exclusively on that

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Denise Gardner: then, or bringing in like you said the data design and the visualization. Look, that's wonderful. Right now, I'm relying also on folks within the provost office or communications across campus. Who can also help you, and depending on where you know again how your campus is structured.

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Bridgette Decent: There is a book that I'll recommend. It's pretty old, but some of most of the tenets and they're still hold true. It's called. Don't make me. Don't make me think

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Bridgette Decent: how to how to tell stories with data. And I can't remember who it's by. But it is. I'll I'll find it. And I'll email it to this group so it can be sent out. But it's an excellent resource. It's basically

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Bridgette Decent: you know. Stephen View says, numbers have a story to tell, and I think that's always going to be the case that we're not just talking about numbers. We're talking about stories we're talking about people we're talking about resources we're talking about, you know, whatever it is. And the

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Bridgette Decent: sometimes the best way to tell that story is with a visualization. We all know there's different types of learners out there. There's visual learners for them. The data visualization is going to be the number one thing that they go to. There's people out there who prefer numbers, and to them don't give them a pie chart. Don't give them a bar graph they want the numbers.

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Bridgette Decent: I think part of the challenge that we have in institutional research is that we have to cater to both audiences. So how do we design these dashboards that have the option for visualizations, or the option for numbers, or having both at the same time, without it being too cluttered and too overwhelming. So that book that I recommended does have some tips and resources on how to balance that.

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James Hunt: So I think just trying to think back to kind of

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James Hunt: where we've sort of evolved with with visualizations. I I think, early on, when we 1st started dabbling in. Well, we even before we did tableau for a little bit. Even before that we were using a kind of an open source. Javascript.

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James Hunt: Thing that was really just producing tables. And and back in those days.

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James Hunt: you know, because it was code and we weren't. And you know our analyst staff, weren't. They weren't trained in writing Javascript or even had that ability. You know, we had a we employed someone an fte whose job it was was to be the person to take. The the analysts would do the sort of data crunching, and they would feed a data set to this Javascript person who would have to craft this web, you know, sort of model. And when we started going into more of like

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James Hunt: visualizations, I think initially, we had the same sort of thought. It's like, well, we really would want to have analysts are going to do the data work right. They're gonna figure out the the joins. And they're going to figure out how to cobble together a data set that's gonna feed a visual. But then we're, gonna you know, somehow have this one

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James Hunt: special person who's gonna be the one to have to build dashboards. And I I guess you know that model fell apart pretty quickly, and it fell apart, I think, largely from a place of quantity where we had so many different dashboards that we're all gonna start start needing to be developed. And then, also.

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James Hunt: you know, we realized pretty quickly that the analysts were the experts in the data. They were the ones that have spent the time of the data. And so and and they weren't just spending time looking at the tables and and writing code, or whatever. But they were also

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James Hunt: you know. They were also asking questions to people on campus about the data. I'm constantly telling my staff, and I had to remind myself of this that you know to the point earlier about, you see, a you know, a line and a table that represents a person.

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James Hunt: It's critically important that we understand the story behind, you know, you see, a here's a single row on the enormous student enrollment table that indicates this type of a drop with this date. Well, what does that mean? What did that student actually experience? What was that? What was the experience like? Where that student came to this choice? To drop this class had to go to this office went through some process. We have to understand that full context. And so I, our analysts.

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James Hunt: we're doing that as a practice. And so it to me. It it became clear that well, we don't need to have a single graphic designer, this designing visuals. We need to really train, empower our analysts to become

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James Hunt: data visualizers. And so that that's sort of the approach that we we have taken. And I'll say, too.

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James Hunt: you know, the kids these days, as they say, get a lot more training in this stuff even in college, than what a lot of us did. I mean, partially because this stuff didn't exist. But I mean, we're seeing students come out of a bachelor's program who

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James Hunt: have had classes where they've used power bi or tableau, and they've got those skill sets, and they're they're not necessarily professionals in it. But they've got the baseline that they can build upon. And so, you know you goes back to hiring. You make a good hire of somebody that's got the

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James Hunt: kind of the wherewithal to sort of self teach and can is curious go out and sort of expand their skill sets. Then

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James Hunt: I don't know. To me. I like that model where the analysts are the ones that are ultimately doing their own visuals.

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Justin Shepherd: And and I, I would just say.

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Justin Shepherd: I'm kind of over the idea of data, viz. And and I'll explain why data, viz. Is not the end. All be all, I think data visualizing data is a tool.

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Justin Shepherd: But what I actually think is that we need to incorporate more from like project management from Pnp black belt 6. Sigma. All that stuff right? Lean, because what we need to do is storytell with it. And so, while we have dashboards, most of our dashboards. The traffic was from other analysts.

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Justin Shepherd: It wasn't from decision makers. And so there's 2 things that we've done to address this, one of which is, we put text at the top of each dashboard that tells you what the results are, and then they know what to look for down below that, so they'll read like, it's a 1 or 2 sentence summary up at the top that says, you know, we see a positive trend in XY, and Z over time, and then you can go look at the proof and the data below. So that has helped to.

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Justin Shepherd: you know, when I'm talking with a dean who has a background in history.

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Justin Shepherd: they're they're not into data visualization. And so it helps us to kind of direct those conversations. The other one is slide decks. Right? Why do we play consultants? Millions of dollars to tell us things that we already know?

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Justin Shepherd: Well, they do it in such a way that senior leadership listens. So let's steal some of their techniques and the way that they design these slide decks and incorporate the project. Management. And we can then tell the story with the, you know.

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Justin Shepherd: captive headlines at the top. Not just to do. Or, you know, background or history. We've got to break our academic training. We've got to break the way that we were trained in our doctoral or master's programs and think of it as a consultant. And that's what we're trying to do to sell our message. And then we use the data to further the data is to further that story. The data is not the end of the story.

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Ashley Ludewig: That was great. Thank you so much for that great discussion. Especially around that last question. And I think that's everything that we had in the chat. So I'm gonna go ahead and pass it to Cheryl Fogler to wrap us.

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Hester, Brian: Ashley. Sorry I just before we close. I just wanted to personally thank each of our panelists again. Denise, Justin, Bridget, and James. Your

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Hester, Brian: your time and efforts, your engagement were really apparent here, and and the insight your candor, your experience, really brought this session to life, and I really feel added so much to our summit as a whole. So really, really appreciate, you guys, the effort you put into this and being here. So now I'll hand it over things over to my colleague, Cheryl Fogler, to close us out. Cheryl.

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Cheryl Fogler: Yeah, thanks. And I just want to echo what Brian said. So thank you all. All of our participants for being here. But a big thank you to our panelists.

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Cheryl Fogler: Everything that you had to say was just so insightful, and it was an honest conversation. It was really clear from your remarks and in your comments in the chat that while each of you might have different approaches, you're all working towards using data in ways that connects people

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Cheryl Fogler: clarifies decisions, strengthens your campuses through data literacy trust with leadership and positioning your Ir, ie. Teams to be strategic partners moving beyond just being the service people who are providing the static reports, but really being proactive and knowing the landscape and the environment, it's just so important. Lots of great resources shared. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that.

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Cheryl Fogler: For everyone else. Tomorrow's closing session is going to give us a hands-on example of a collaboration in action with a project showcase from the Ut Chattanooga office of accreditation and assessment.

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Cheryl Fogler: With our Ut system data analytics team, they'll walk us through how they transform student feedback into something practical and actionable for faculty and leadership. So if you haven't registered yet for that session, Ashley put the link in the chat, and it's also on the summit website.

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Cheryl Fogler: just like Brian mentioned yesterday. You'll receive a quick feedback survey next week, and we'd love to know what stood out for you and how we can keep improving. And in the spirit of some of this conversation, if there's any way that we can help facilitate building those relationships.

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Cheryl Fogler: whether it's across our our system, or if it's, you know, with more in the Iri community, you know, with with

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Cheryl Fogler: getting everybody's contact information, Justin's James Denise Bridget's and sharing that out, we'd be happy to to help work on building some of those relationships for you. So have a great rest of your day, and we will see you tomorrow.

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James Hunt: Thanks, everybody.

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Jorge Perez: Okay, I think that leaves only ie. Folks on the call. Excellent job, Ashley. Excellent job, Brian. Excellent job Cheryl. Thanks to everyone

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Jorge Perez: for your help. With that I purposely asked that last question, because I saw that we weren't getting close to 1130. I want us to get a little bit closer to 1130. So we got there. I agree, Cheryl, you made the comment, that this is one of the best summit sessions we've had couldn't agree more. Did you happen to notice, actually, how many folks from the other institutions.