{"id":7435,"date":"2023-10-23T08:00:15","date_gmt":"2023-10-23T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.everylearnereverywhere.org\/?p=7435"},"modified":"2023-10-20T12:16:31","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T17:16:31","slug":"data-culture-data-literacy-and-building-a-community-of-practice-at-your-college-or-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.everylearnereverywhere.org\/es\/blog\/data-culture-data-literacy-and-building-a-community-of-practice-at-your-college-or-university\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Culture, Data Literacy, and Building a Community of Practice At Your College or University"},"content":{"rendered":"

Colleges and universities have growing pools of data available to them about how their students learn, but many professionals are intimidated by this resource, unsure of how to access it so it can inform teaching practices, program-level course design, or institutional planning. Many others are simply unaware of the data available to them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn higher ed, a lot of data goes unused,\u201d says Denise Nadasen, Assistant Vice President of Institutional Data and Analytics at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). \u201cEven when data is used, it might not always be in the most effective ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

The growth of digital learning tools and other software applications in student support, recruiting, and other operations means colleges and universities have a tremendous resource available to them. An effective way to put that resource to work, Nadasen says, is fostering a community of practice devoted to data literacy. A community of practice can nurture an institutional culture that embraces data while supporting individual faculty and other professionals as they build specific skills. It also builds understanding and transparency about what data is available that can be used to support students.<\/p>\n

Nadasen leads APLU\u2019s Data Literacy Institute<\/a> and recently has been been helping colleges and universities grow their communities of practice through a program on Building an Academic Data Culture to Support Student Success<\/a> in partnership with Every Learner Everywhere\u00ae. The service includes workshops, coaching, and consultation for cross-functional collaborative teams working to improve how they use data analytics. It can be provided in a range of synchronous, asynchronous, in-person, and remote formats.<\/p>\n

\u201cData literacy is having individuals who know how to access the data and can apply it to a specific problem or area where they can analyze it and understand what they’re seeing,\u201d Nadasen says. \u201cThey\u2019re able to take that information and figure out what to do with it. And a data culture is made up of the behaviors of faculty and staff who value and encourage the use of data to improve decision making.\u201d<\/p>\n

Data literacy and community of practice<\/h2>\n

A community of practice is effective at fostering data literacy because of the varied professional roles and perspectives brought to the table. Whereas an individual faculty member may have difficulty trying to apply a data-informed change, incorporating course designers and department chairs into that same initiative could have drastically different results.<\/p>\n

In the cohorts Nadasen has worked with in the APLU Data Literacy Institute and in Building an Academic Data Culture to Support Student Success<\/a>, collaborations have included student success professionals, advisors, institutional researchers, faculty, department chairs, associate provosts, and more.<\/p>\n

She says one of the first steps institutions can take to form a community of practice that fosters a data-oriented culture is to identify the existing \u201cdata literacy champions\u201d who can serve as peer mentors to the more data-hesitant faculty. A data culture won\u2019t succeed as a one-person operation but needs a network of professionals who understand and trust the data, trust each other, and trust their own growing data literacy.<\/p>\n