Education | Oracle Analytics Services
Our team has supported The University of St Andrews to use insight on data to deliver a world-class education.
The deeper insights St Andrews was able to achieve with our expert support has empowered its academic and administrative staff members to improve their ability to support students as they navigate their educational journey.
With St Andrews' enhanced data-driven approach, they are now able to garner greater insights about their students' educational journey.
The University of St Andrews, established in Scotland, 1413, holds the distinction of being the oldest of Scotland's four ancient universities and the third-oldest in the English-speaking world. Building on its long-standing reputation, the University of St Andrews has twice been recognized as "University of the Year" by The Times and Sunday Times' Good University Guide, achieving this prestigious title most recently in 2022. It stands as one of only two UK universities to have earned this distinction.
Its student population of over 10,000 is notably diverse, with over 145 nationalities represented. This significant diversity, while a great strength, also presents a real challenge when it comes to managing each student's academic progress and their overall well-being.
The University of St Andrews relied on a data warehouse for insights into student performance, funding, attendance, and well-being. This was particularly crucial given the large number of international students. However, a review identified several issues with the existing data warehouse, including:
To address these challenges, St Andrews engaged our team to support the selection of new design methodologies and tools. We recommended several options and collaborated with the university to create a capability matrix, scoring tools against a weighted criteria. Ultimately, our team proposed a hybrid architecture combining DataVault and Kimball star schemas, with ODI for automation and Oracle Database for the data warehouse, while retaining QlikView for reporting.
What did this new approach mean for St Andrews?
The University of St Andrews faced significant challenges in effectively managing student academic progress and well-being. Their existing data warehouse, crucial for insights into student performance, funding, and attendance, presented several issues. These included overall complexity, difficulties in onboarding new developers, unreliable change promotion, and a lack of data lineage.
Furthermore, the data warehouse suffered from a granular security model that led to potential inconsistencies and a lack of agreed-upon definitions and documentation. To address these critical problems and improve their data-driven approach to education, St Andrews sought external expertise to select new design methodologies and tools for their data management.
St Andrews decided to review several design methodologies and tools and asked our team of experts to support the selection process. Rittman Mead, a Pythian Company, recommended three additional tools and two design techniques to be included in the review process.
To help the university make an objective decision about the best tool to adopt, we worked with St Andrews to create a capability matrix. This matrix rated a key selection criteria, such as the ability of the tool to implement change, the availability and cost of developers in the market, the release management capability, and the tool’s ability to implement the selected modeling methodology.
The University assigned weights to each attribute, and our team of experts evaluated and scored each of the candidate tools based on these criteria. After the assessment, we proposed a new hybrid architecture and approach, based on a custom version of DataVault combined with Kimball star schemas. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) would be used to automate the loading of the data warehouse, which would run in an Oracle Database. Reporting and dashboards would continue to be produced in QlikView.
The innovative combination of data engineering, new architecture, and implementation enabled St Andrews to be much more agile in ongoing developments of the data warehouse, fixing issues, adding new data, and improving reporting and analysis. We were able to recommend a development and delivery framework and provide accelerators to the university, which sped up the creation of the new data architecture and reduced the risk of the data transformation project. Our development framework and the accelerator had been tried and tested on multiple projects internationally, giving the university confidence in this approach. As a result, student administrators gained much deeper insights into their students, and for the first time, they could now track each student’s complete journey throughout their studies at university, allowing for better future planning and a more responsive approach to student needs.
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