About

This website is part of the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office Division of Innovation and Infrastructure’s (DII) ongoing efforts to fulfill the Chancellor’s Vision for Success.  By providing clear definitions of the elements and metrics found on the various data portals within the Chancellor’s Office , DII is working to make the vast amounts of data collected within its various systems to provide insights about student and organizational progress and to facilitate data-driven decision-making.

Strategic Approach

Education metrics are created for many purposes. Legislative and budgetary requirements and considerations.  Research and tracking changes in enrollments or program needs as resulting from demographic, economic, or social changes.  Each of these purposes shape the processes and procedures that are used in producing the metrics.

In order for the data to be able to provide the information and insights required of the above reasons, the component elements of the metrics must be clearly defined, both in technical terms, but also in human terms and ideally standardized across and within systems. If the operational definition of similar metrics is different, the differences must be well documented and understood by end users. ^[a]

The approach towards :

• Documentation – Data elements and their usage must be documented along with legitimate variants of the element and its usage.  With the variety of systems from which data is sourced, and portals on which it is made available, it is critical to document what each element and metric means, so that
• Dissemination – An effort must be made to not produce “shelf-ware” but to make readable and relevant versions of the documentation into Slide Decks, How-Tos, FAQs, etc.
• Standardization – This involves the establishment of clear and usable norms with respect to physical, logical, and semantic/conceptual data elements. Standardization in this sense does not mean the restriction of the use of data or of tying the hands of developers. It means that there exists a default definition and usage of an element; but along with this are variants of how an element is operationally defined and used. This could be considered an operational definition of harmonization.
• Guidance – In addition to the more static and durable documentation, guidance should be provided to data publishers. Guidance could be a human resource, a review process, an easy business process specification, an AI, etc. This document begins addressing the Standardization and Documentation areas of a strategic approach to harmonization. It has been concluded so far that: An investment must be made in documenting new information as well as organizing existing information.

Some frequently used elements such as Student Count and Ethnicity, among others, should be detailed and analyzed first in order to make a quicker and bigger impact.

Website Layout

Press the Open Menu button at the upper left to navigate to the various components. In addition to the Home page are the following sections:

Data Mart

A list of Data Mart metrics. Each metric has an individual detail page that lists the data elements involved in producing the metric. Each element is linked to the official definition for the data element.

LaunchBoard

This section contains a list of LaunchBoard metrics taken from the LaunchBoard website.

Data Element Dictionary

The Data Element Dictionary aka the DED provides a list of elements with links to the PDF file that defines the element. Links from the Data Mart and LaunchBoard sections are directed to the PDFs in this section.