Campus Data Systems & Sources

We know that there’s a lot of campus data noise – here’s an overview of the tools and data sources that are the most important for the largest number of UWM data consumers.

Data Systems

Below, we’ve included the most commonly-used official systems for capturing/reporting the current state of UWM data, as well as the tools used to visualize and export that data for other day-to-day purposes.

PAWS

PAWS is the student information system used by UWM students and staff for capturing the current state of all academic – course enrollments, program/plan/advisor assignments, degree processing, among many others. It is the system of record for UWM student data, and the primary source of data for the majority of campus reports and dashboards.

Requests for role-specific administrative access for additional functionality (such as grade roster access or student advisor functionality) can be submitted through the DAR form. Please see the PAWS Administrative Access page for more information.

OBIEE

OBIEE is the official BI platform for UWM student data reports and UW System (UWS) HR dashboards. Since OBIEE’s go-live in March 2019, UWM authors have created a collection of shared dashboards with UWM data warehouse data to meet a wide variety of campus needs. Please expand the menu below for a complete list:

Academic Standing: Identify students for a given term who have an academic standing other than No Action.
Application to Enrollment Funnel:This dashboard combines both application/admission data with enrollment data to show the progression of students from the time of application to the time of enrollment. Users can filter the data in a number of different ways, including by school/college, plan, and subplan to see counts of applications, admits, matriculations, and enrollments. This dashboard is updated weekly.
Application to Enrollment Funnel Final: This dashboard is identical to the weekly application to enrollment funnel dashboard, except it provides the final load data. This dashboard is updated every term and provides 5 years of historical data.
Athletics Enrollment Information: Identify athletes with less than 12 credits, a grade change or a program or plan change in the last 30 days.
Class Roster: Identify the list of students enrolled in a given course.
Class Tallies: Identify the current enrollments in (a) specific course(s) as of the previous business day.
Current Plans: Identify the active students in a plan or program and their enrollment status for the current and future terms.
Dean’s Honors: Identify students for a given term who have earned the Dean’s Honors.
Degrees Awarded: Identify the number of degrees awarded by completion term, plan/subplan, and plan type.
Degrees Expected: Identify the number of expected degrees based on students’ calculated graduation terms, plan/subplan, and plan type.
General Application Data: All-purpose dashboard for viewing current applicants and their application status. Contains contact information, test scores, application progress, and other useful information.
Licensure Disclosure Students: Identify students in Certificate Programs who need to be notified that they may not meet certification requirements for states other than WI.
Official Historical Comparison of Enrollment Dashboard: Shows the official, aggregate enrollment headcount, FTE, and credits and units by demographic information, academic profiles, course, funds, and other variables. It shows multiple terms/years data and provides comparisons over time.
Orientation Registrations: A dashboard designed to provide a list of who is signed up for orientation sessions by date including academic and advisor information for the student. It also includes counts by date and school/college.
Re-enrollment Dashboard: Reports weekly counts and percentages of students not re-enrolled, along with pivot tables and filters related to academic career, year in school, race/ethnicity, primary school/college, degree-seeking status, GPA, credits, academic performance (e.g. probation, academic drop), and financial information (e.g. account balance, financial holds).
Term Change and Gap Year: This dashboard is designed to provide information on students who either term changed from the previous Fall semester or filled out a Gap Year form and have now been admitted for a future term.
Weekly Comparison of Enrollment: Provides the comparison of current and previous years’ enrollments by student data (headcount and FTE), credits, funds and sections.

All UWM faculty and non-student staff are eligible to request OBIEE access through the DAR form. There are two main OBIEE roles – Student Records Consumer (consumer) and Student Records Author (author). Consumer access allows users to run and export data from shared dashboards, while trained authors can create new ad-hoc requests and new shared dashboards for other campus users.

Power BI

Power BI is a Microsoft BI tool that combines industry-leading visualization and data analysis capabilities and tight integration with other Microsoft 365 (previously Office 365) offerings to create impressive dashboards and reports and a more meaningful way for data consumers to read and interpret campus data.

In March 2020, the DGCC recommended that the campus adopt Power BI as the new campus-wide ad-hoc reporting tool.

Power BI Licenses and Sharing

There are two Power BI license types which are assigned to individual Microsoft 365 users:

Power BI Free licenses are assigned to all UWM faculty and staff with an EMPL1 designation and allow you to consume content in Premium Workspaces (see below) and publish content to your own personal workspace—Free users are not able to share content with other users through the Power BI service.

Power BI Pro licenses allow you to share your data, reports, and dashboards freely with other users who also have a Power BI Pro license. You can also create and be a contributing member of workspaces, publishing content for other campus users.

Power BI Free licenses are automatically assigned to all UWM faculty and staff during ePanther provisioning. Power BI Pro license requests must be submitted through the Data Access Request form, and will be reviewed to assess need and determine additional security for higher-risk data or more broadly distributed content.

There is also one other component which is important for understanding Power BI sharing functionality:

The Power BI Premium Capacity is not a per-user license like Free or Pro. Instead, it provides dedicated server resources that can be applied on a per-workspace basis. Premium Workspaces can host large datasets, reusable data flows for updating commonly used data, and most importantly, share published Power BI content with anyone with a Free license. There are significant, additional funding costs for UWM departments wishing to utilize these additional server resources.

To recap – Power BI authors who will only be developing content in Power BI Desktop do not need a Power BI license. Power BI authors who want to distribute that content through the Power BI Service will need a Pro license to share and create and manage workspaces for their users. Power BI consumers will either need a Pro license or a Free license (if they are consuming content published in a Premium Workspace).

EAB Navigate

Adopted in fall 2014, Navigate combines technology, research, process improvement and predictive analytics to enable proactive, data driven conversations with students. Visit the Academic Affairs Navigate webpage for more information about obtaining access and creating Navigate reports.

Data Sources

The system below is the officially-supported campus data sources for student information. As new data sources are integrated into common UWM reports and dashboards, we’ll add them to the list below.

UWM Data Warehouse

The UWM data warehouse (DW) is a database of student information that is updated regularly with PAWS data. The DW has two types of data – 1) operational data (updated with the previous day’s PAWS data between midnight and 6am) with things like course enrollments, students’ academic plans/advisors and 2) snapshot data (captured on a set schedule and/or frequency) with enrollment/application information for historical comparison and/or mandatory reporting purposes.

For a clearer picture of the semester enrollment snapshot timelines, see the OAIR Enrollment Data & Reporting Process page. More technical details about DW load schedules and requesting DW access can be found on the UWM Reporting website.