Becoming...
An e-book of the 10-year development of a highly efficient institutional research office
While searching for innovative solutions to improve office efficiency and better fulfill the campus’s data needs, the Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) developed unique insights and strategies to address key bottleneck issues through automating data reporting and reducing repetitive work and inefficient communication.
Collecting and analyzing data is a crucial step in making data available for campus data users, but successfully communicating data with users is equally important. Over the years, MIRO has explored how to be better forward-thinkers and active communicators and developed different strategies to communicate data effectively with different audiences.
To increase efficiency and lower the risk of human errors for all offices involved, the Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) streamlined and automated the data preparation process for the Common Data Set (CDS) and many external surveys’ data collection and reporting, minimizing the reporting burden while improving data accuracy and consistency.
In order to help faculty and staff better understand their student body and identify trends of different student populations, the Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) created different interactive enrollment data mining and visualization tools to help the faculty and staff access timely and comprehensive enrollment data.
To better support the transfer student population, Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) created various transfer student related filters in dozens of web apps, which can help faculty and staff gain a better understanding about the transfer student population, such as the demographics of transfer students, where they transferred from, how they progress at the university, and what their daily experiences are like.
Qualitative data directly reflects some of the most complex and dynamic issues students and employees encounter, which is incredibly valuable for institutions to make continuous improvement. The Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) brings qualitative data into daily institutional research practices through regularly collecting qualitative data and efficiently disseminating it through a series of homegrown interactive web app tools.
Student success is a very complex concept and is certainly challenging to measure. The Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) built a comprehensive data toolbox for various student success data, both quantitative and qualitative, and helped the university to better support student success through using more accurate, accessible, and actionable data.
The Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) shifted from its past supporting role in producing NSSE reports to a proactive role in leading a successful NSSE administration. The office implemented a campus-wide marketing plan that increase survey response rate to 52%, which is more than triple the size of the response rate compared to 2011 when there was no marketing plan at all,and created innovative data & report dissemination tools to efficiently disseminate data among offices and programs across the campus in a timely manner.
The Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) transformed a tedious and manual process of data preparation to an interactive online data tool that provides more timely, comprehensive, and accessible data to programs that are under review. Additionally, MIRO’s approach of supporting the academic program review is not limited by a fixed dataset published on the Program Review web app, but rather emphasizes the importance of using a variety of web apps that can further address programs’ unique data needs.
In 2021, UH Mānoa successfully gained a ten-year reaffirmation during its institutional accreditation review from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). The Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) provided timely data support for the University’s accreditation preparation. Most importantly, its robust data infrastructure helped the University meet the accreditation standards that request institutions make data more accessible, transparent, and consistent for both internal and external users.
Understanding the impacts rankings have on universities, Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) has made great efforts to track ranking data and communicate this information to people within and outside of the UHM community. Each year, when a new ranking is published, MIRO staff pulls out the information and saves it to their centralized database. MIRO created an interactive data visualization web app to help university data users easily locate and use ranking information, so the university can more efficiently use ranking data in different areas, such as marketing, recruiting, and student/community engagement initiatives.
Sustainability is an important topic and major focus within higher education institutions today, but is not an area that institutional research offices often provide support for. The Mānoa Institutional Research Office (MIRO) has supported campus sustainability efforts with their skills of survey design, data analysis, and data tool building at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
