Universities are keen to maximise their performance in the university league tables. The league tables represent a barometer to the public of a university and can have an impact on encouraging students to enrol; employers views of graduates; learning aims & objectives; funding; staff morale.
Monitoring a student’s progress is an essential part of ensuring that Higher Education Institutions are achieving their teaching and learning aims and outcomes at all levels i.e., schools, programmes and modules; not only must they ‘get this right’ but they must also be able to show that they do.
Regulatory obligations mean that this information has to be transparent and accessible and needs to reflect a continual programme of improvement against learning aims. University codes of practice concerning student progression specify that results need to be combined at source from assessment and examination boards; this can often stem from multiple data sources and be presented in multiple ways. Combining this information from these sources can present a challenge.
A university’s ability to manage student progression reporting can be improved, in part, by the better collection and integration of the data that is reported and a data warehouse-based approach is often essential to complete this integration from the key corporate systems of: Student Records, Human Resources and Finance.