Have you ever wanted to better understand how well students are performing in DE classes, broken down by demographics? It's easier than ever to obtain this data now at the college, discipline, and even course level, using the LATTC Institutional Effectiveness Dashboards.
Have you ever been curious to know how other California Community Colleges are doing with student success and retention in DE, generally or maybe specifically in your discipline? Data supporting this is easily obtained using CCC's DataMart system.
For the data-curious, or for those who have to do this kind of thing during program review, read on!
In case you weren't aware, LATTC's Office of Institutional Effectiveness has been doing great work in making more meaningful data available on demand. No more submitting a request and waiting! Satisfy your data-answerable questions in moments!
You can use the various options to compare from term to term, see how other departments are doing, and more. Be sure to click the page arrows at the bottom of the charts to see other ways the data has been aggregated.
State Data
Using the CCC DataMartLinks to an external site. can give you points of comparison for all kinds of data, including DE, at the state, district, and college level.
At the top, point to Queries and then click Outcomes just below.
On the page that comes up, click Retention/Success Rate
Select the parameters of interest to you - State, District(s), or College(s); Term(s); Program Type(s) (i.e. TOP codes/disciplines); Instruction Method; and DE Instructional Method (if you choose DE only under Instruction Method).
Click View Report
Then you may modify the Demographic Options, TOP Options, and Course Status below the report. For most purposes I uncheck all of the Course Status options to just get all Credit data in the report.
Click Update Report
Just above the report, click the Export to-> button (with Excel selected) to download a spreadsheet for further analysis.
Note: Rather than steps 4-7, you can click Advanced Layout first in the middle section to give you some additional, interactive options for report building, though some variables such as ethnicity are not available in that mode.
Notes on some things that can trip you up as you use DataMart:
Pandemic-era data is less reliable. At minimum, it is known that non-credit DE data is not handled well, if at all, by DataMart. Institutions may have classified and reported classes differently as well.
There are some odd DE modes that can’t be filtered out if you choose the all-inclusive Instruction Method. If you want to exclude the unusual DE modes, you must run a DE-only report.
If you change the parameters at top, don't immediately click Update Report - you must first View Report, then re-adjust the format selections at bottom, then Update Report.
If you click Advanced Layout you get some interactive report-building features which are nice, and Export will generate a spreadsheet that reflects what you have selected to open up or to close down in the report. However, closing some areas but not others can generate inconsistent results.
Once you get the report you want for statewide or for your district, you can’t just tweak to get the other way around, or by college/district -- you have to re-create.
Downloaded Excel reports come out with columns alphabetized rather than in chronological order, so all Fall columns appear before the Spring columns.
Watch out for oddly combined columns on the left side of your data (first column of data) in Excel downloads.
2.6 - Other LATTC DE Guidance: Intellectual Property and Class Size 2.8 - LATTC DE Policies & Procedures: Conclusion