Knowing more about your students can make a big difference to how subject coordinators design and deliver their subject content. To help you plan accordingly, the recently updated Power BI Subject Dashboard provides access to:
- valuable data on a subject cohort’s demographics
- entry pathways
- degrees of study
- language background
- number of repeating students
- past subject results
This interactive dashboard is updated nightly, so you’ll have always have the most up-to-date reports on hand. The easily accessible data visualisations can help you to:
- better understand the diversity of your student cohort
- track subject enrolments in the lead up to the census date
- analyse & evaluate student performance at the end of session (once results have been released in CASS)
- evaluate the impact of curriculum redesign or learning design projects on student performance
Using the dashboard
To access to the dashboard, you will need to be registered as a subject coordinator in CASS. If you don’t meet the prerequisites and still require access, log a ServiceConnect ticket with ‘Access to subject dashboard (DAAI)’ as the Brief Description and include the subjects you coordinate under Additional Details.
Once you have access and can view your subjects:
- select the Welcome option from the left-hand menu
- choose a subject from the list of the subjects that you coordinate across the year
- choose the year and session you want to look at
- click the Summary button to see an overview of your cohort (see screenshot below)
You can dig deeper by drilling down into enrolments and results for your currently selected subject, year & session.
Data insights for a better student experience
Gavin Paul shared a summary of his Introduction to Mechatronics Engineering subject during a recent webinar that introduced the new dashboard. He explained how he found it useful to see how the enrolments tracked over previous sessions – this informed whether he needed to get more tutors or book larger spaces than what was already allocated. Number of repeat students and results by cohort also provided key insights, but most valuable was how it could help allow for a thoughtful transition for first-year students.
Certainly for the Introduction subject, it’s useful to know about the number of students who are coming in who are commencing students, and then I can focus a little bit more attention on those ‘introduction to university’, inclusive activities, things that engage them more. Also, I know to be a bit more patient with them – explaining how Canvas works and navigating through that in the earlier stages. Whereas for the latter-stage subject, it goes without saying but also the data backs it up, that I don’t need to do that so much.
Gavin Paul, Associate Professor, School of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering
To understand other benefits of using a subject dashboard in practice, read how UTS academics Jeremy Lindeck and Amara Atif have used the previous version to get a useful snapshot of their student cohorts.
Help us refine the dashboard
Newly enhanced by PowerBI, the latest version of the dashboard is a work in progress and we are open to hearing your ideas for how it can be improved further. Join our Teams site to explore and discuss the subject dashboard with your peers. We look forward to working together to make this the most useful source of information for planning your subjects – and understanding your students!