(US and Canada) Lori Lindenberg, District Director of Enterprise Analytics and Technology, Maricopa Community College, speaks with Reese Hartle, PubSec Senior Education Strategist at SHI, in a video interview about leveraging data to enhance the learning experience and improving the consumption of data across the organization.

Lindenberg makes informed decisions regarding college enrollment, completion, retention rates, and more based on data from the National Student Clearinghouse. She says that introducing and implementing courses based on data insights has successfully led to improving the completion of courses and student retention. The institution introduced experience programs based on the insight that students needed to understand the available support from the institution. 

Lindenberg says that introducing and implementing courses based on data insights has successfully led to improving the completion of courses and student retention. She speaks about introducing experience programs based on the insight that students needed to understand the available support from the institution.

She goes on to speak about creating a culture of analytics that is mindful of bias. Lindenberg opines that the fear of using data inappropriately has slowed or limited its democratization. She states that transparency is key in battling bias and reveals that her team releases data to help the community understand the complexity of students. She however maintains that delivering the data with context to the large number of employees in the institution is still a challenge.

Next, Lindenberg discusses the challenge of getting data used, especially by the executive leadership. So, the team used the dashboards and data tools to quickly answer questions coming from the executive leadership instead of making it more complex. She also mentions the following initiatives that improved the utilization of data products by 64% in less than a year. They are:

• Insights – Creating highly visual reports that combine data from different dashboards to answer a burning question
• Data concierge services – Building raw and organic curated datasets for power users around specific topics like financial aid or advising

Further, Lindenberg urges data leaders to empathize with end users and communicate data more clearly. There is efficiency in making data pretty and friendly, she concludes.

CDO Magazine appreciates Lori Lindenberg for sharing her insights and data success stories with our global community.

See more from Lori Lindenberg

We Are Heavily Interested in Understanding if Our Students Are Fulfilled