From Spreadsheets to Insights: How Piedmont Technical College Is Building Data Skills For Student Success

Like many people in higher education, Joseph Clamp has some unofficial duties that colleagues turn to him for. As the learning management system administrator for Piedmont Technical College (PTC) in South Carolina, his primary responsibilities are implementing the LMS and troubleshooting technical problems for individual classes.

Unofficially, though, faculty and others around the campus often request that Clamp pull specific data from the LMS for them. Running reports has been no problem, but that alone didn’t always answer the questions faculty were asking.

“I was in a position where stuff was at my fingertips, but I didn’t necessarily know exactly how to use it in the best way,” Clamp says. “If a dean comes and asks me about a specific test in a certain class, I could send them a CSV, but it wasn’t exactly presentable for them.”

So in early 2024 when the Dean of Online Learning at Piedmont was putting together a team to participate in Building an Academic Data Culture to Support Student Success, a professional development program from the Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU), she asked Clamp to be project lead for PTC. The college was going to build its capacity to manage, interpret, and, ultimately, use data, and the LMS administrator was often at the intersection of those conversations. Clamp also saw it as an opportunity to develop his own data skills.

Building an Academic Data Culture is designed to help cohorts develop custom action plans for using data for student success. It’s one of a menu of professional development services offered by Every Learner Everywhere’s network partners centering digital learning and equity. The objectives for this program include building data skills in academic data literacy, building a collaborative, cross-functional team, developing an action plan to enhance equitable student success, and promoting continuous improvement in examining data through an equitable lens.

Picking a project

PTC participated in this program between March and June of 2024 with a team of seven people including faculty, the math department chair, the associate registrar, and other academic affairs staff working on student success issues.

APLU began the program with a campuswide data maturity index survey, which Clamp says showed there was a low level of awareness across the institution about where to turn for data. “I think a lot of this came as a surprise for us,” he says. “So growing our data culture as a college was a big selling point.”

The program is organized around the campus cohort selecting a particular problem to work on, and the PTC team decided to focus on measuring the impact of a new set of courses that are being implemented.

The college had been in the process of replacing its traditional college skills class, College 103, which focused on note taking, test taking, working with faculty, and navigating college programming and resources. One limitation of College 103 was that it wasn’t relevant enough for every student, so PTC was forking that course into several unique versions tailored to broad subject areas, including business, STEM, public service and education, arts and humanities, and healthcare. One of those new versions had been piloted in spring 2024, and the rest would be launched in fall 2024.

The group from PTC participating in the APLU program decided to measure the impact of the pilot and to establish systems for the ongoing assessment of all the redesigned College 103 courses.

Related reading: Data Culture, Data Literacy, and Building a Community of Practice at Your College or University

New look

Clamp says one thing the group realized while improving their data literacy is that they could and should consider more than just the success rates — A, B, and C final grades — of a course. What they really needed to answer is for whom the courses were successful and why.

“Success rate alone just doesn’t tell the whole story,” he says. “You could easily have a very good success rate, but it’s still not a good class [for some students]. We definitely got more into the weeds of it.”

For example, they began to look at individual quizzes preceding the final grade and to compare those points in the pilot course with the same points in earlier terms. This meant activating an underutilized automation within the LMS.

Disaggregating student data was key to developing insights beyond the success rate. For example, as a technical college, the Piedmont student body includes dual enrollment (high school) students and returning students, alongside first-time, first-year students.

“Now we have a better understanding of how to segregate that data by things like dual enrollment,” Clamp says. “Are they doing better than our first-time students? How are they affected by this class? Also one of the big things we looked at was class by modality.”

For example, a unique feature of PTC is “teleclasses” that are broadcast to remote classrooms, which vary in whether or not a supporting instructor is present. The group working on this data project was able to point out lower grades in the courses without an instructor present.

Prepared for the future

Clamp says several elements are in place for the ongoing assessment of College 103 and to make the campus culture more focused on data.

First, PTC now has a team, an administrative structure, and a workflow in place responsible for data reporting that didn’t exist before.

Second, awareness of who to collaborate with around data questions is higher now. “Even as the LMS administrator, I didn’t know who our math department head was before,” Clamp says.

“And our associate registrar was able to pull data I didn’t know the college had because I had never interacted with it. The nursing instructor in the group with us had interacted with me before, but she didn’t necessarily understand what kind of information I could get for her. Everybody in the group understands now that even if they don’t know where to get the data from, there’s likely somebody at the college who does have access to it.”

Asked what he would advise peers at other institutions about the program, Clamp says, “even at an individual level, you’re getting professional development out of it. This is something that’s going to stick with me for a long time. If data analyst isn’t in your job description, but you want to learn, it’s an excellent jumping-off point. And looking at the college level, if you’re interested in just trying to make the college better, it’s an excellent thing to do.”