Did you spot the new Uni rating facility recently published by Hobsons? It looks like it is still early days for this particular one but to me this is another example of some potentially valuable information that is really hard to get into a usable form. There are 20 ratings used to compare Australian institutions and just about all of them appear to be on the list, that means 20 measures we can benchmark ourselves with, except the data isn’t really accessible unless you want to type it all in every day…
The tertiary admissions systems for NSW and QLD are further examples of systems that have huge amounts of useful data that require manual logon, download, upload processes before they can be processed by our BI systems, although I seem to recall that at least one state has a better system than this and wasn’t there some initiative to automate and align all states? What happened to that?
I actually just spoke to Hobsons and they are now considering providing a CSV extract facility of some kind ‘ion about a month’. They’ve promised to keep me informed so I’ll spread the word if the usage picks up and the facility is made available.
Meanwhile, are there other similar sites you know about that have this kind of data? Lets share the knowledge.
Hi Rob,
Great to see the post up and running!
This seems really interesting, I had not heard of the site until I read your post.
It appears that not many students have seen it either as there seems to be a low response rate at present.
A couple of questions:
Do you know where this site is being advertised?
Is this something that needs to be promoted by the Universities themself or would it be more beneficial to keep it independent through Hobsons?
Final thought:
As discussed at the Gold Coast forum there is a significant amount of communal data stored around universities in Australia and it would be great to come up with a standard extract and model process across the Universities to leverage this data with minimal effort. There really is no need to reinvent the wheel every time. I would be interested in others thoughts on this matter.
It would also be good to get those who capture the data to make this as extractable and consistent as possible. It is fantastic that you have spoke to Hobsons regarding this and I would be very interested in what eventuates from those discussions.
Robert Sim
Thanks for the comment - I haven’t heard back from Hobsons yet but I notice the usage is only creeping up slowly on their site. I don’t think there is any active advertising or marketing of the site and judging by the spread of responses no one institution is pushing it either. I am going to write a separate item on your ‘Final thought’ as I have a few ideas there. Cheers, Rob