Last week, Ometis hosted the 2023 Higher Education Data Conference at the iconic Lord's Cricket Ground in London. Attendees heard from their peers in the HE sector alongside data experts covering a wide range of subjects including:
✅ The advantages and value brought by modern cloud data analytics
✅ Introducing AI and machine learning models to predict and improve student retention
✅ Analysing student attendance and surveys
✅ Applying data governance and quality processes to ensure accurate reporting
✅ Smoothing the transition from traditional on-premises deployments to the cloud
✅ How to enable and encourage user adoption of dashboards
✅ Automation of tasks to make processes more efficient
✅ How to move and use data in near real-time
✅ Write back capabilities within dashboards.
We've had some great positive comments from attendees in the post-event survey and are already booking in meetings to follow up interest.
The use of AI for predicting students likely to leave their course was the most talked about session post event. Maintaining a high level of retention is key financially for universities but also for maintaining their reputation as a quality education provider. It is also key for keeping a high level of student welfare.
We demonstrated a dashboard that showed how data from multiple sources is fed into an algorithm that then predicts students at risk. This is based on many different inputs including attendance, grades and general participation in university life amongst others. The dashboard enables what-if modelling of policy changes that then update the figures and projections. This uses the Qlik AutoML functionality.
Huge thanks to John Lumley from University of Chichester, James Foster from University of Kent and our special guest, Dan Williams from PizzaExpress for their presentations. All gave attendees the ability to see how Qlik dashboards are used in action and each shared their tips and tricks on optimising these.
Simon Kirby from our partner Inphinity demonstrated the huge step forward in dashboard interactions by showing the ability to write back and recalculate. There are many uses of this but planning and budgeting in particular were discussed at the event.
Governance and quality are crucial elements of any data strategy. This ensures that users can trust the data in front of them is accurate and relevant. Natalie Wignall from Qlik explained how the key focus areas of data governance including availability, usability, consistency, data integrity, data security, and standards compliance can all be catered for using the Qlik software.
We'd love to hear from you if you would like to explore any of the elements in more detail. Please either complete the comments section below or book a meeting with one of our experts to learn how to get more value from your data.