01 May Welcome to our Blog!
Welcome to the NDUS-IR Blog!
I write this first blog posting from Washington, D.C. where I am attending an annual IPEDS workshop. IPEDS stands for Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and it is the federal system to which all postsecondary institutions who receive Title IV monies must annually submit accountability data. What is Title IV you may ask? Title IV is the federal student loans that individuals receive to assist in paying for college. In other words, if we want our students to have access to federal student loans at each of our institutions, we must submit data to IPEDS on an annual basis.
Accountability data aside, I do want to welcome you to our blog experiment. We are the staff of the North Dakota University System Institutional Research (NDUS-IR) Department. This blog came to life because as we talk among ourselves, we realize how much and how varied the things we do with data are, and we want to share that with other like minded people in the world. This blog will allow us to showcase our work in NDUS-IR, and hopefully will also allow us to connect to others who are doing interesting things as well. We can learn from each other!
Since this posting is just a teaser of things to come, I want to introduce you to myself and my staff. This blog is a team effort, and we all either succeed or fail together.
 I am Jennifer Weber and I direct the NDUS-IR department. My primary functions are to oversee the department and provide system level enrollment reporting to the State Board of Higher Education. I also oversee system wide IR Shared Services, work closely with the State Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) and serve as the state coordinator for federal reporting. As the NDUS-IR is also contracted through the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction (NDDPI) for data analysis and reporting, our department is ultimately responsible for the data of all students attending public institutions in the state of North Dakota, pre-kindergarten through graduate school. My passion is educational data privacy, and my current efforts include producing guidelines and advisement for the roles and responsibilities of higher education when applying artificial intelligence/analytics to student data. |
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 Dr. Gregory Carlson is an Institutional Researcher – Special Projects with the North Dakota University System. Working closely with the Department of Public Instruction and Information Technology Department, primary responsibilities include project management, data framing, and ensuring compliance with requirements for statewide K-12 public school Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) accountability reporting through the Insights interactive public dashboards. He assists in addressing accountability data questions from education stakeholders and facilitating use of educational data to facilitate continuous improvement of student learning within North Dakota’s public K-12 schools. |
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 Dr. Ellie Shockley is an Educational Data Warehouse Specialist on the NDUS institutional researcher team. In this capacity, she also works closely with the Department of Public Instruction (PK-12) and the Information Technology Department. She often responds to education data requests that come from state agencies or from outside of state government. Her work ranges from pulling raw data and sharing it according to our best practices, to conducting complex statistical analyses in order to answer research questions, to assisting with inter-agency collaborations related to education data, and more. |
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 Ryan Jockers is a Strategic Analytics Coordinator for the North Dakota University System (NDUS). In this position he works with all NDUS institutions providing direction for strategic planning and institutional effectiveness processes as required by the State Board of Higher Education. Further, he assists in providing strategic data solutions to all entities within the NDUS, including close collaboration with other state agencies such as the Information Technology Department, Department of Public Instruction, and Job Service ND among others. Ryan has a passion for understanding the true impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on a society, and strives to find the most efficient use of AI that aligns with the strategic goals and objectives of higher education in North Dakota. |
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We look forward to bringing you along on our blogging journey. Feel free to contact us at any point in time for feedback or comments on our blog.