Tim Stanley, Associate Director of Institutional Research and Information,
Utah Valley University
As part of our academic program prioritization process, decision makers at UVU need to understand how a department’s course offerings are utilized outside of the department. Many departments on campus generate a large amount of credit, despite having only a few majors. Looking only at the retention and graduation of their students offers an incomplete perspective into the department’s productivity. Departments offering general education courses or courses required by majors outside the department have this additional argument of “internal demand” during the prioritization process.
This visualization was built using Tableau, which readily allowed administrators to directly interact with the data. The current view displays registrations in courses in the department of Behavioral Science for the current semester (Fall 2013). Forty-four percent of current registrations in the department are with students with a different major. (A multi-year display is planned for the future.) Individual courses are identified if more than 25% of the students have majors outside the department, and the course has at least 25 students total outside the major. These default thresholds can be modified by users as needed to tell their story. Additionally, users can drill down to explore which majors outside the department tend to register for particular classes. In this example, I have displayed the outside students currently registered for Behavioral Science Statistics. Although displayed here below, that would normally be on a second page. We can see that three majors: Exercise Science, Communication, and Criminal Justice make up the vast majority of outsiders in this course.
