Big data, big improvements

As Manager of the UTS Peer Assisted Study Success (U:PASS) program, Georgina Barratt-See wanted to know if it was really making a difference to student success. With 10 years of data to analyse she didn’t know where to begin. That’s where postgraduate student Len Tay and the Master of Data Science and Innovation’s subject iLab came in – upskilling staff in data literacy while empowering students to work with real clients.

— Georgina Barratt-See

We have 110 high-achieving and compassionate leaders running study sessions with students, mainly in first-year subjects. We know peer-based work is much more effective as the students see the peer leaders as just another student.

When I heard the Master of Data Science and Innovation had a subject giving master’s students projects to look at real industry data, I instantly wanted to know more. I've been doing my job for a very long time now – almost 10 years – and we compile a lot of individual data sets each session and perform a lot of evaluation. We look at how often students come to classes, the types of students that attend, their opinion of U:PASS, that kind of thing. But, there was no linkage of that data.

Read the full story in the UTS Newsroom