DATA VISUALIZATIONS USING BLACKBOARD ANALYTICS AND TABLEAU PRESENTERS

DATA VISUALIZATIONS USING BLACKBOARD ANALYTICS AND TABLEAU

PRESENTERS Krishnan CSUB, Office of Institutional Research, Planning & Assessment Michael Bullis CSUB, Information Technology Services

OVERVIEW • Creating insightful and impactful Tableau visualizations on student admissions, using Blackboard Analytics • Using this process users can access “real-time" information • Examine OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) data sources

PROVIDING A CONTEXT • Managing the volume, variety and velocity of data is critically important to its value, but also of importance is finding ways to organize and view the information to actually be able to identify trends and shifts that might otherwise go unnoticed. • Enrollment managers can use this data to direct and assess the strategies imposed for growing their student number efficiently and effectively. • The challenge is finding a way to express the data in an efficient way that can be easily read and understood.

SURVEY • Who here has Tableau? • Who here has Tableau connecting over a live connection? • Who here has built or has any kind of ETL platform in place? • Is anyone familiar with OLAP? Is this a term you have never heard? • Glad you are here!

TECHNICAL OVERVIEW • Blackboard Analytics vs Tableau • ETL • OLAP • Perspective

DATA = AN EXERCISE OF INSANITY • Cost • Ad-hoc reporting • We all share (and contribute) this insanity

DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MANAGEMENT • an approach to business governance that values decisions that can be backed up with verifiable data. • The success of the data-driven approach is reliant upon the quality of the data gathered and the effectiveness of its analysis and interpretation. (https: //whatis. techtarget. com/definition/data-driven-decision-management-DDDM) • "quality of the data gathered“ • "effectiveness of its analysis and interpretation“ • Having the right hammer for the job

METHODOLOGIES • Manual to Automation Report Evolution • ETL model – Star Schemas

STAR SCHEMAS

PERFORMANCE BOTTLENECKS • Relational database reporting • The OLAP layer

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IMPLEMENTING ETL WITH OLAP • Technological OLAP platform irrelevant • Costs: Time, Money and knowledge requirements

ENTER BLACKBOARD ANALYTICS AND TABLEAU • We have both. A long story on how we got here.

BLACKBOARD PROS: • Provides a running start • Lessened knowledge requirements • Delivered as a turnkey solution • Pyramid front end – Demo Time? • Full ETL development platform

BLACKBOARD CONS: • Pyramid • Learning Curve • One Size Fits All • Overwhelming

TABLEAU PROS: • Look at it, it's beautiful! • Data source connectivity: Microsoft Excel, Text File, Microsoft Access, JSON File, PDF File, Spatial File, Statistical File, Other Files, Tableau Server or Tableau Online Actian Matrix, Actian Vectorwise, Amazon Athena, Amazon Aurora, Amazon EMR Hadoop Hive, Amazon Redshift, Anaplan, Apache Drill Aster Database, Box, , Cloudera Hadoop, Denodo, Dropbox, Exasol, Firebird, Google Analytics, Google Big. Query, Google Cloud SQL Google Sheets, Hortonworks Hadoop Hive, IBM Big. Insights, IBM DB 2, IBM PDA (Netezza), Intuit Quick. Books Online, Kognitio, Map. R Hadoop Hive Marketo, Mark. Logic, Mem. SQL, Microsoft Analysis Services, Microsoft Power. Pivot, Microsoft SQL Server, Monet. DB, Mongo. DB BI Connector My. SQL, OData, One. Drive, Oracle Eloqua, Oracle Essbase, Pivotal Greenplum, Postgre. SQL, Presto, Progress Open. Edge, Salesforce Splunk, SAP HANA, SAP Net. Weaver Business Warehouse, SAP Sybase ASE, SAP Sybase IQ, Service. Now ITSM, Share. Point Lists, Snowflake Spark SQL, Teradata OLAP Connector, TIBCO Data Virtualization (Cisco Information Server), Vertica, Web Data Connector Other Databases (JDBC), Other Databases (ODBC)

TABLEAU CONS: • "Next generation" visualization tool • No ETL development platform • It is a barebone system • Data extracts and Relational database live connection

THE WIN SITUATION • OLAP live connection from Tableau to Blackboard • Simple to set up • Flexibility

IS OLAP DEAD?

CONCLUSION • Dashboards and data analysis can be enormous tools for enrollment management. • Identifying the institutional activities that increase the likelihood of enrollment will allow you to enhance your recruitment strategies. • Dashboards won’t answer every question • OLAP connections provide speed and flexibility