Learning analytics blog

Blog 2 - A data catalog for educational data

Team learning analytics (LA) has started to work on a data catalog for educational data. A data catalog provides an overview of what data are available in what systems and what data are being processed. With a data catalog, we are taking the first step toward realizing a data market. The idea is that everyone, both employees and students of Utrecht University (UU), can efficiently access the data they are allowed to access in order to investigate their own learning and teaching processes.

What is a data catalog?

A data catalog provides an overview of all the data that exists within an organization. Documentation of the data in the data catalog is done on the basis of metadata.

Metadata is a description of everything you know about your data. For example, what do we mean by the term student? Is this everyone who takes a course within the UU, so both bachelors, masters and professionals taking continuing education or do we limit ourselves to bachelors and masters? But also: in which applications, such as Osiris, Blackboard, etc., are student data created and used? What kind of data are they? Who is allowed access to the student data and why (for research or educational purposes)?

So a data catalog does not contain actual data, but a comprehensive description of the data present within UU, as well as who is allowed to access it and for what purposes.

Why a data catalog for educational data and why team LA?

Team LA is concerned with answering educational questions, and looks at whether insights from data can provide (partial) answers to these questions. We therefore make use of data from the educational applications deployed within the UU. We examine what data are available and in some cases combine data from multiple systems. In these processes, it is essential to have an overview of what data actually exist and what properties these data have (the aforementioned metadata). Because no data catalog was yet available within UU for educational data, team LA is now taking the first steps towards this.

Once the data catalog is in place, this will mean that the steps from our LA roadmap can proceed more efficiently. It will be clearer more quickly what is meant by data and who is allowed to access it. So for scaling up LA projects, working on the data catalog is an incredibly good step.

Outside of LA, the data catalog will be of great value to UU as well. It is the first step toward establishing a data governance program and eventually toward setting up a data market. UU is committed to enabling the evaluation and evolution of education. With a data market, you can give students, faculty, and other staff access to data in a responsible way, making it possible to gain insight into your own learning and teaching processes.

Team LA's goals for an educational data catalog are thus:

1. We gain insight into the data processed and described in educational applications used within UU. Such as Osiris, Blackboard, FeedbackFruits, etc;
2. Together with the privacy officers, we map out who is allowed access to what data, in what form and for what purpose. For example, who may see individual data and who may see the data only at the group level? Can the data be used for research or only for teaching?
3. Long-term goal: We set up processes for how students and staff can quickly access the data they are entitled to.

Project Plan.

The initiative will run from April 2024 to September 2025. By the end of August 2025, we hope to have mapped the metadata, access rights and processes around getting access for nine commonly used educational applications. In April 2024, we began preparations for the project, such as writing a project plan and involving the appropriate people within the Education, Research and Students (SO&O) and ITS departments.  We have now started mapping the metadata of the first educational application.