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LSS Student Projects: Open Projects

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LSS DATA
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ProRetension: Form Submission Analysis

There are a number of student services that use Proretention forms with which to start a process or to access services. Currently we do not have a standard report to extract data from PR and have to scrape the data from the web interface. The first task might be to set up a knime workflow that scrapes data from the web in a way that we can schedule on a regular basis. The second tasks will be to gain some understanding of the submission patterns

LSS Analytics: Staff Directory

There is no live data source of staff and their positions in the organisational diagram, yet this is important for a number of services in LSS for different purposes. We have a current extract of all staff and monthly reports on joiners and leavers. The first part of the project will be to shape the data from the main list into a form we can use in Tableau and to build a dashboard that allows us to drill down in the organisational chart and do searches for individuals to find where they are. An organisational chart graph in Tableau will be excellent. The second task will be to set up a knime workflow to add new staff and mark staff whom have left to the main directory. Top marks will be awarded to the students that are able to allow the shape of the organogram to adjust to joiners and leavers.

LSSIT dashboard

This is a project to resolve some challenges in the design of the dashboard that has already been developed or to come up with an approach that delivers an accurate ITIL standard report on the number of queries created and resolved and carried over to the next week for the LSSIT team. Currently the closed tickets are far exceeding the open tickets and we cannot figure out why. Part of the challenge will be to create a dashboard that checks this data.

Academic Calendar

We are developing a process where different student facing teams can record the events and communications that they are responsible for in a Proretention Workshop form. The major task would be to represent this data in a way in which multiple users can get a feel for what events are running or will be running that might impact on their service. A draft version of the dashboard has been created as a guideline but there are some technical as well as visualisation issues that need to be resolved before it is fully useful.  It may require blending with student data to get a full picture. For example Brexit might affect foreign students from the EU who might require new visas to finish their studies, it would be good to have a representation of the amount and type of students that would be affected by a particular event.

HEAT API Project

The Education Liaison & Outreach Team uses the Higher Education Access Tracker to log the activities we do, keep a record of the people we work with, and identify target schools and colleges. HEAT offer an API which allows users to access the data they have stored in the system. We are developing a Web Data Connector to utilise the HEAT API, providing access to data to be used in tableau visualisations. A basic Web Data Connector has been completed, implementing the security protocol required for access, and accessing a limited number of fields. This project is to develop the functionality of the Web Data Connector, to make full use of the HEAT API, and improve usability. The project requires an understanding of JS, PHP and basic HTML.  

HEAT Data Visualisation Project

The Education Liaison & Outreach Team uses the Higher Education Access Tracker to log the activities we do, keep a record of the people we work with, and identify target schools and colleges. Whilst the HEAT system provides a limited number of dashboards which allow the visualisation of this data, we would like to create a tableau dashboard providing a snapshot of the activity we have carried out over a given period. An example of the type of data to be visualised is provided. This dashboard would take the place of a monthly report that is put together manually by colleagues in the Education Liaison & Outreach team, which places data in a set of tables to outline the number of activities we have undertaken each month, how many people attended these activities, the types of people who attended these activities, and a breakdown of the types of activities themselves. This report would serve as the starting point for this project, with the potential to add a range of other elements/visualisations based on the range of data available.

Target Schools/Colleges Data Visualisation Project

The Education Liaison & Outreach Team works with schools/colleges across London to deliver projects which range from attending a careers fair to bringing whole year groups to campus to try out subject based activities. Because all of these activities are relatively resource intensive we have to make decisions about who we work with, or who we’d like to work with on a daily basis. We currently do this with a dataset in table format, and based on various criteria depending on the request. This project is to create a dashboard that allows us to simplify that process. The ideal situation would be for the user to input a school/college name, and based on this be provided with a set of visualisations of data relevant to that school/college, and ultimately, based on the criteria we use, a flag as to whether they are an appropriate target. The dataset we use at the moment is generated from data available from the Department for Education, HESA and the Government Statistics Agency. The project would require that these data are pulled together in a coherent way, and related to the target criteria set by the team. An example of a similar project can be found here. We’d be looking at developing something similar to the ‘School Data Explorer’, but with our own criteria. Examples of datasets are provided in the ‘About this App’ tab.

Student Success Festival

Twice every year multiple teams organise a Student  Success Festival. It is very important to understand who is drawn to the faire. Data is available from proretention appointments and combined with student profile data. 

The kinds of questions that need answering:

Demographic breakdown of students who attended (age, sex, ethnicity etc)

Course and year of study of students who attended

Grades (so far) of students who attended (for 2018/19 data, if it possible to see a comparison/contrast if grades prior and post attending one of the festivals?)

How frequently students accessed support services prior to attending the festival in comparison to post attendance (ideally, we'd like to see an uptick).

Which day was more popular (12th or 13th)

How many students registered on the day vs pre-booked on pro-ret?