It is important for a university to have a view of a student’s journey that will help to monitor the progress and retention of a student. The Enterprise Data and Business Intelligence (EDBI) team worked with various departments to draft the different phases of student life at Rice. This exercise resulted in the Student Life Cycle model as shown below. The Student Life Cycle model represents a 360-degree view of students beginning with student recruitment and ending with matriculation to alumni. Each of these phases in the life cycle represent Data Warehouse (DW) integration projects that are required to complete the overall student data integration initiative. Our first project is Admissions, then we will move into enrollment and academic data.
The EDBI team kicked off the DW Enterprise Admissions Integration project in fall 2020. This project will centralize current and historical admissions data into the DW to support analytics. This integrated and governed data will enable Admissions data consumers to perform trend analyses and predictive analytics.
Building a conceptual data model is important in the overall DW development life cycle as it is a structured business view of the data required to support business processes, record business events, track related performance measures and facilitate efficient conveyance of system details with stakeholders. The Admissions conceptual data model shown reflects the business process and data relationships of student admissions.
The EDBI team met with each Rice Admissions department including Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, Rice Business, Undergraduate, and Visiting Students to discover analytics use cases and gather requirements. These discoveries were completed in several virtual white boarding sessions with the data stewards and data consumers. Based on these discussions, the data was modeled for common admission related concepts such as applicants, test scores, previous degrees, departments, decisions, etc. The Conceptual Student Admission Model supports all legacy and current Admission application instances at Rice and is scalable for any future Admissions related application.
As next steps, the EDBI team will be focusing on logical data modeling, data architecture design, design of data marts and development activities for the Enterprise Admissions Integration project. This will be followed by the next project of creating a conceptual model for the Student Enrollment and Academic phase in the Student Life Cycle model.