Learning Analytics - Build an FE College Business Intelligence Dashboard with Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a great solution for colleges (and other training organisations) that want to build and share business intelligence dashboards.

It’s free to get started, there are good online support materials and it's very accessible to anyone familiar with the Microsoft technology stack. With Power BI you can connect to in-house data sources, design rich interactive data dashboards and then share them with colleagues - ease of use, flexibility and price are key advantages over other dashboard solutions aimed at the FE sector.

If you're new to Power BI then here are five things to know:

1. There are two major components - the Microsoft Power BI web application and the Power BI Desktop application. Use the desktop application to design dashboards and then upload them to the Power BI web application so they can be shared with colleagues.


2. There’s also a Power BI mobile application for interacting with data on the go.


3. Power BI comes with data connectors for a whole series of established data sources. You can also connect with live data datasources - so you can with a bit of work get a real-time view of what's happening in your college.


4. You can integrate with Active Directory - so you can share different reports with different groups within your college.


5. The basic Power BI service is free but you pay $9.99/user/month if you want to conect to live data, share reports with colleagues or store more than 1GB of data per user in the cloud.

Data visualizations in Power BI are richly interactive - data is filtered and visualizations change when a user selects a particular department, year or cohort. SkillsLogic’s Learning Analytics dashboard illustrates this really well - pick a year or a month in the live demo below and see how the other visualizations change.

Why not start to build some in-house expertise? Get someone in your team to download Microsoft Power BI Desktop and develop some simple dashboards. You can prototype designs quickly by reporting on dummy data imported from MS Excel - and building those prototypes will get you thinking about how easy it's going to be to access the operational data you want to report on. Some ideas to help you get started are:

• Track course enquiries and enrolments across departments and show the difference between current numbers and what was forecast;


• Get a daily view of student attendance across departments;


• Look at how you're using sessional staff across different departments;


• Investigate student satisfaction - create visualizations that show how completion rates vary across departments and highlight the reasons why some students don't complete.

SkillsLogic can of course help you get started on your Power BI journey and we've got particular expertise in designing and building reporting solutions for the FE sector - contact us on 0114 383 0093 or info@skillslogic.com if you'd like to know more.