March 26, 2025

Minutes

• Attendance

New Discussions, Projects, or Initiatives

• Banner Cohort Field
  • Andrew revisited the topic of the Banner cohort field. There had been an ad hoc group for this purpose prior, but it fizzled out. There is renewed interest in using this field to record cohorts for tracking and reporting.  
  • There is potential for this data to be pushed to ZogoTech but first the data would have to be evaluated and cleaned so that it is trustworthy for reporting. There will need to be buy-in to successfully clean up the data. 
  • There needs to be a conversation about who will take responsibility and curate the data that is entered into this field. 
  • Danny mentioned that a first step would be to create a definition for what the term cohort means to NECC and how the table will be used institutionally. 
  • There also needs to be a documented business process that outlines how data will be entered and maintained.  
  • If there is interest in pursuing this, a new ad hoc group should be formed. IT and individuals from areas that use the table should be included to begin tacking this. 
  • Christine shared that PACE currently tags their students in this table and has an established process for doing so. PACE staff look at this table regularly as they need to ensure their students are not also in SOAR.  

• Experiential Learning
  • Sandy R. discussed the challenges she is faced with when getting data related to internships and experiential learning.  
  • Currently, this information is collected by the program coordinators. Some programs have detailed agreements and tracking requirements, while others are less defined. There is no consistent standard across departments and no cohesive way to collect and store this information. 
  • Because of this, Career Services struggles to gather aggregated data that illustrates how many students are taking part in these programs so that they can track capacity and discover opportunities for scaling. 
  • The current process is that Career Services sends a survey at the end of each semester to all coordinators, but only half respond back. 
  • Shawna suggested Sandy find this information out by running a report on the courses designed for these opportunities.  
  • Sandy agreed that would be helpful but wouldn’t solve the whole program as she needs additional information such as the student’s employer and where they are placed. 
  • Danny suggested Sandy reach out to a colleague from another institution to get ideas for how this is done elsewhere.  
  • Kirsten mentioned there is a need for this information beyond Career Services too.  

• SAS Data Governance Assessment
  • Kirsten informed the group that she reached out to SAS, the consultants who originally helped set up Data Governance in 2021, to assess how we are doing. They will review whether we are on track and doing what we agreed to.  
  • The consultants will visit the campus and conduct small group interviews with various stakeholder groups like IT, Leadership , Data Governance managers, ad hoc groups, and data stewards. 
  • Kirsten hopes this will be an opportunity to assess our data ecosystem and review the roles of IT and data managers. 

• DHE Data Council
  • The last DHE Data Council meeting provided a number of updates related to upcoming changes.
  • The Voluntary Framework Assessment (VFA) is going away and will be replaced with the Post-secondary Data Partnership (PDP) framework. This will shift how we report and to who.
  • Moving forward the state will be focusing less on IPEDS and more on HEIRS. The state will also be looking for more metrics on their Strategic Plan for Racial Equity.
  • Hopefully there will be more information on the new requirements by June. This way we can identify where the data is and who may need to work with Mike to get it.

Standing Updates

• Cross Campus Data Forum (CCDF)
  • The CCDF is discussing the possibility of adding course grades to the HEIRS annual report. They also want to start tracking credit accumulation by major. 
  • They are also exploring whether to postpone the HEIRS due date from August to September. 
  • Mike reminded the group that there have been internal conversations about moving NECC’s freeze date to later in the semester (e.g., November 12^th for the upcoming fall).  
  • The automated HEIRS reporting pilot program with Cedar Labs is still ongoing. They are currently discussing the possibility of extracting the data out of ZogoTech instead of Banner. 

• IT Update
  • Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) Assessment
    • The college is currently undergoing a PCI DSS and GLBA assessment. This is not an audit, it is an opportunity to find and fix things before an audit.
  • Ring Central Texting
    • Ring Central has disabled texting for NECC until we have a texting policy that is publicly available.  
    • Danny wants to expand on the texting protocol Stella created as a starting point. From there, it would have to be formulated as policy and put into the catalog so that it is public. 

• MyNECC
  • The MyNECC platform is being replaced by Ellucian Experience. The plan is to soft launch the new platform to a few areas before the fall.  
  • The new portal will have a more simplified design that limits redundancies. It will have a card format that will help group links and resources. The goal is to limit content that could become outdated.  

• Lifelong Learning Extended Education (EE)/Noncredit Update
  • N/A

• NECCi and NECC One
  • There is now a Data Governance page on NECC One that includes links to meeting minutes and agendas. NECCi will remain active as it is still needed for our Tableau dashboards.  
  • Andrew has created a Data Literacy hub on NECC One and invites the group to provide feedback on the content. The page will work best if it can be a helpful resource for the group and others across the college. 

Ad-Hoc Group Updates

• HR Data Cleanup
  • IT is implementing a new software that will help manage accounts. 
  • The group will be tabled for now.

• Software Inventory Group
  • N/A

• Texting Platform Research
  • N/A

Tabled

• Pre-requisite Cleanup

• Secure Data Sharing and Transfer Practices/Policy

• Veteran Affairs Data Cleanup

Miscellaneous

• There was a misconfiguration between the firewall and Oracle servers that was causing Banner and DegreeWorks to drop. That issue has been resolved.