Mathematics is a powerful tool.  We use applications from math all day, every day, like when we drive over a bridge or look at our email.  

Math is very difficult for many people, and they struggle with it.  Many students at our university (and almost all others) need to repeat a math class to progress in their program and complete their degrees.

Our research has uncovered some important facts:

• Many students repeating math classes often must do so more than one time, which extends their time to degree and could prevent them from graduating.  

• Students who use the Math and Science Tutoring Center improve their chances of passing their math courses.

• The positive effect from math tutoring is especially large for students who are repeating a course.  “Repeaters” increase their chances of success by roughly 15 to 20 percentage points!

• But, we found, only about 10 percent of students repeating math were going to tutoring

The Data Science Team, supported by DoIT and the Provost's Office, designed a pilot program in conjunction with the Math Department to “nudge” students repeating 100-level math courses to use tutoring.  

A nudge is a message designed to provide information to many people at very low cost that changes behavior over time.  An example of a nudge you see in everyday life is the roadside sign that says “Click it or ticket.”  Our nudges let students know not just that tutoring is effective, but also how effective it is.

This semester (Spring 2021) we sent nudges to 114 students using a myUMBC personal post.  About 70 percent of students receiving the nudge read them, and we have evidence that suggests that the nudge leads to an increased use of math tutoring by roughly 30 percent.  

The pilot is now in its 8th semester.  During that time we’ve nudged over 1800 students repeating their courses.  

In addition to this program, we’re using what we’ve learned about nudges to help students in other ways that support their success, including combining them with predictive analytics for enhanced early alerts.

By Bob Carpenter

Early next week, the week of 3/8/21, the Webex app, formerly Webex Teams, will receive an upgrade enabling all features contained in the Webex meetings app. This change makes for a more simple user experience and means that many campus users will no longer need to run a second Webex Meetings software.

For the last year much of the campus community has needed to run both the Webex Meetings and the Webex (Teams) software in order to have complete functionality for calling, asynchronous communication and in-meeting experiences. In the next week Webex users will be able to upgrade their Webex application to include all in-meeting features previously available only in the Webex Meetings software. This includes in-meeting chat, breakout rooms, emojis, grid views and more.

In this second of a series of updates we’ll give a brief description of Salesforce, UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

Salesforce is a market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.   In higher education, CRMs are used in recruitment, admissions, student success, and alumni relations.  Salesforce is an important tool to help us maintain and grow our enrollment...vital to UMBC’s ability to weather the pandemic and our long term response to changing age-based demographics in our region.

Big news! Salesforce will launch on March 3rd. “Launch” means that all prospective undergraduate student communications and their activities will be collected, analyzed, and maintained in Salesforce making it the system of record for prospective student data.  

The next phase of the project is integrating prospective students’ requests for information, built and tested by our team, into the platform.  Marketing Cloud, a companion product to Salesforce, uses information from these requests from potential students with a personalized journey (experience) and helps admissions staff identify what information might be of most use to them.  

At the same time the team is finalizing the launch, we’re also conducting training and activities to maximize the value of our investment and taking important steps to extend the platforms to the Graduate School and Division of Professional Studies.  

This is a big project with many interconnected tasks. Congratulations to the cross-campus team that has accomplished a great deal in a very short period of time. 

UMBC’s Learning Analytics Program is a community of scholars interested in using analytical data to advance student achievement and success. We’re relaunching the program after, like so many things, Covid-19 interrupted our plans.  The program has two parts, a community of practice and a competitive mini-grant program supported through the Provost’s Office.  

Meetings of the community of practice are open to all faculty, full and part time.  During these meetings, we’ll share ongoing research, have invited speakers, and learn about the data, tools, and platforms that faculty can use to improve student success and learning.  We’ll have infrastructure experts, data scientists, and others on hand to help interested faculty with access to data and to help design analysis or interventions to better understand the factors that improve student learning or student success in face to face, hybrid, or online classes.  

Our first meeting of the community this semester will be held on March 11, where we’ll have virtual visitors from Indiana University show some of their work on grade surprise followed by a discussion about using learning analytics from both a practitioner and research perspective.   More details about the seminar are available here.

The mini-grant program is open to all faculty (full and part time). Each successful applicant will receive $2,000 in research funds and when needed, a license for our visualization software to enable the exploration of data and the sharing of discoveries. The Analytics and Business Intelligence Teams in DoIT and the Provost’s Office will provide support to those who need assistance with data (and will coordinate support with IRADS when needed) and in creating visualizations or helping design and implement the analysis of data.  

We are interested in proposals surrounding student success and retention through graduation, especially those that explore relationships between activities and learning in one course and outcomes in others.  We are also interested in proposals from instructors of courses that have low success rates, are critical progression points for students, or that impart fundamental skills required for success in the major or program. Collaborative proposals are allowed and encouraged. Multiple proposals with different goals may be submitted from the same department.  Participants who identify course or practice redesign as part of their work are eligible and encouraged to compete for a Hrabowski Innovation Award.

Interested in more details?  Here are links to the WebEx recording of our kickoff meeting and the PowerPoint presentation that went along with it.  You can also contact me (Bob Carpenter) or John Fritz directly.

Almost everyone has found themselves in a position where they need to ask a question, but aren’t sure who they should ask or how to ask it.  It can be frustrating (and inefficient) to ask several people for the same thing with the hope that one of them can help.

The Analytics and Data Science team, IRADS, and the REX team have made some simple changes to take the confusion out of asking for help with reports, analytics, or data requests.  We’ve added links to the sites people generally go to find data.  Look for a link that says “REQUEST HELP WITH DATA, REPORTS, OR ANALYTICS.”   Clicking on that link takes you to a page which helps you to refine your request and to make sure the proper people see it.  The requests become part of the familiar campus RT ticketing system.

Here’s what happens when you submit a ticket.  Your request automatically becomes part of a queue reviewed by the Data Warehouse Group at its regular Friday meetings.  At that meeting, your request is triaged, the appropriate member of the group is assigned to be responsible for it, and a due date is assigned.  It will be tracked until it’s closed.  

Not sure exactly what to ask?  Look for my favorite link “None of the above fit or I don’t know how to ask for what I need”   Our teams will work with you to help you define your question and help you get an answer.  

The enhanced analytics, data, and report request system takes the worry about who to ask off your plate, and the RT ticket you generate takes away the worry about your request slipping through the cracks or being lost in an email inbox.

In this first of a series of updates, we’ll give a description of what HelioCampus (Helio, for short) is and why we’re investing in it, provide an overview of UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

HelioCampus was established as an independent company after being formed at UMGC. It provides a data analytics platform covering the student lifecycle, institutional finance, and advancement.  Designed to run using Amazon Web Services, Helio provides UMBC with the next-generation decision support services we need to operate more strategically and sustainably (from a financial perspective).  

Put simply, Helio integrates our enterprise data warehouse with advanced reporting and visualization tools.  With it, we’ll be better able to share information from our systems and answer key questions through analytics, data storytelling, and data science and do it easier and faster.  Helio’s a key component of an integrated infrastructure for academic planning, assessment, and analytics and it helps to support our strategic plan, strategic enrollment plan, and the recommendations of our Middle States accreditation Self-Study.  

Our goals for Helio are to broaden and deepen our use of analytics to increase enrollment, improve student success, shorten time to degree, ensure financial sustainability, and accelerate gift giving...all key elements of UMBC’s plans to weather the current environment and position ourselves for growth and success going forward.  

Helio uses Tableau visualization software.  The first set of visualizations and tools, often called dashboards, has already been deployed to a small group of campus users to allow them to test the platform.  These dashboards focus on metrics related to admissions, enrollment, retention, and graduation.  People using Tableau have had very positive reactions to its ease of use and power.

In this first of a series of updates, we’ll give a brief description of what Salesforce is, provide an overview of UMBC’s goals for the project, and summarize what we’re currently working on and what’s next.

Salesforce is a market-leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.  Companies and nonprofits use CRMs to advertise and build relationships with, and track the contact they have with, their customers and patrons.  In higher education, Salesforce is used to support recruitment, admissions, student success, and alumni relations.  

UMBC has started an exciting, large, multi-year project to use Salesforce to help us in all of those areas.  In the first phase, we’re customizing and implementing the portion of the platform that helps with the recruitment of both undergraduate and graduate students using the Marketing Cloud component.  Marketing Cloud helps us provide potential students with a better, customized, experience and uses new digital marketing campaigns to show the value of a UMBC education. It helps admissions staff identify who our potential students are and what information might be of most use to them.   

We’ve just finished mapping out the different processes we use to recruit and admit students so that we can improve and automate them in Salesforce and the Marketing Cloud.  Our Admissions, Digital Marketing, and SA Teams have been hard at work in support of the project. The next step involves customizing Salesforce for UMBC. 

We’re projecting a “go-live” date for the first phase in the Spring of 2021.  Go-live includes demonstrating the platform and training our staff to get the greatest return on our investment and better serve our prospective students and families.  

Salesforce is an exciting and important part of UMBC’s Strategic Plan and Strategic Enrollment Plan.  We’re delighted to let you know about it, and that it’s proceeding on schedule. 

Robert Carpenter       
Deputy CIO, Division of Information Technology

Associate Provost, Division of Academic Affairs

The DoIT Technology Support Center is looking to hire additional consultants to work during the Spring semester and beyond. Please see our job description below and visit our job posting on UMBCWorks to apply. (Search for TSC Student Consultant.) The application will be open until January 12th.

We're specifically looking for students available to work during the following hours:

• Monday 1pm-8pm
• Tuesday 12pm-6pm
• Wednesday 8am-12pm, 2pm-4pm
• Thursday 12pm-4pm
• Friday 8am-2PM

TSC Student Consultant Job Description

Technology Support Center (TSC) student consultants are the first points of technical contact for the UMBC community and those who do well often go on to work in other areas of the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). Minimally, consultants are expected to provide initial triage and support for a wide range of information technologies including accounts, hardware, instructional technologies, networking, software, telecommunications, and basic web development.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to the following:

• Provide technical assistance to users by phone, online and in person;
• Answer TSC phones in a professional and courteous manner;
• Create, update and resolve tickets in the Request Tracker (RT) ticketing system;
• Create, update, suggest and recommend relevant FAQ articles to users (www.umbc.edu/faq);
• Provide direct assistance to users on technical issues they cannot easily resolve on their own;
• Respond to all work-related communications in a timely manner;
• Escalate urgent problems to the Full-Time staff, as appropriate.

Required Skills and Experience

• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate by phone or in person.
• Demonstrated writing ability.
• Demonstrated ability to achieve successful outcomes in handling difficult situations and customers.
• Demonstrated analytical and troubleshooting skills.
• Ability & willingness to learn coupled with a clear understanding of one’s technical abilities, so as to triage and escalate an issue that leads to an effective solution for the user.