Higher Education Statistics Agency has developed an industry-wide program to collect data and report accordingly in higher education. It is a very flexible, stable program across all institutions and is needed for about three times a year. It improves the quality and capability of the higher education pattern and scheme. The program has been termed as Data Futures.
According to reports, the launch of the program has been postponed to another year or so because it was not ready to deliver the results of the academic year 2019-2020.
The program aims at delivering review but also holds the power to provide value to the sector, as informed by Andy Youell – Strategic Data Analyst.
The program is believed to change the working pattern of higher education on how it retrieves its data. Being a government agency, HESA also interestingly has collaborated with the private sector on a complex, industry-wide project.
The program when conceived was a hard deal to achieve along with the expected delivery result. It remained a tough experiment for HESA, the higher education institutions, etc. Because the program will deliver results thrice a year, Susan Wignall – Capita business development manager says that it will provide more accurate and updated information as required.
Now Capita is a vending company and the program is a hand for it to connect better with its customers. However, collected the data from where it is stored and accessing and exporting it is quite a task from a university’s system. The beta pilot phase is being used by many customers and this, in turn, has helped Capita to find its way through the project and weave its product accordingly.
As mentioned, the UK Higher education sector is as well facing a problem in retrieving standardized data. The way the data is stored and separated varies from one institution to the other and if this program could bring about a common pattern for all, it would indeed be of great help. But on the other hand, the universities need to do their part too. The data collected by them must be accurate completely before they send it to HESA.
Data recognition for higher education has been quite a low process. Especially in the UK, in terms of data collection, they lack behind compared to their US counterparts. Data Futures, therefore, is a game-changer that provides general data protection with improved management and quality assurance. It offers a lot of advantages to the institutions since they derive appropriate data to make better decisions.