Greetings from your new institutional researcher

Dear KCC Faculty and Staff:

I'm excited to begin my new role as institutional researcher for the college.  I know I'll be spending a lot of my time working on reports that are necessary for accreditation.  It's also my job to help everyone to obtain and analyze data and other forms of information.  I'm hoping that better access to information will help everyone in their duties and decision-making.

So I'd like to start by asking you, what kinds of data would be useful for you?

Please email me with your requests.  The more clearly you can phrase your question/request, the easier it will be for me to help you.  Also, please note that privacy and confidentiality may prevent me from being able to fulfill certain requests.  If your request involves information that pertains to someone else, I will have to get their permission before going ahead.  For example, if a math instructor wants to know how students do in automotive classes after having taken math, that will require permission from automotive faculty before I can fulfill the request.

I can also help with designing surveys to gather information.  I have already heard from some people who would like to do faculty/staff surveys to help with the accreditation self-study.  For these, I'll be working with Anne and Bonnie to gather all the survey requests together so that we can minimize the amount of surveys that people have to fill out, and eliminate the repetition of questions.  Please discuss your planned survey with me before the end of the Spring 2011 semester so that we can design them and be ready to administer them in the Fall.  If there is a reason that your survey needs to be done sooner, we can work that out also.

In the future, I'll be developing material for an Institutional Research website.  This will include a request form, and will allow you to look up key data for the college.  You'll also be able to browse through past findings and reports from the IR office.  For now, just email me if you have a request.  I will aim to fulfill requests as soon as I can, but please allow for approximately two weeks in case I am busy with accreditation work or other requests, or it is a complicated project.

I'm looking forward to working with all of you, to see what we can learn from all the data generated by the college.  Feel free to stop by my office in the OSC room 201/C, right next to Annie Rellin.

Thank you!

Jon