873: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - with ⁠Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald⁠, University Manager of Business Intelligence Analytics, ⁠Antioch University⁠

Elvin Freytes: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to add up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Elvin Freytes, co-founder of the EdUp Experience. And today is the last day of Ellucian Live, eLive 2024 in San Antonio, Texas. And it's been absolutely phenomenal. And I finally get a chance to be on the microphone. Shout out to my co-founder, Dr. Joe Sallustio who did 20 episodes, which is awesome. So this is the last one and I'm excited to dive in. And so, as you all know, I am notoriously bad at pronunciation and I'm going to try my best to get this right. OK, so our guest today, your guest today is Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald. And she is University Manager of Business Intelligence Analytics at Antioch University.

Well done Elvin. It's going to be all good from here on. Got the hard part out of the way. How you doing? What's going on?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: I'm doing fantastic. Thank you.

Elvin Freytes: Well, you sound great. So that's wonderful. Okay. So Cyndi, tell us all about what you do and how you do it.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Okay, well, business intelligence analytics is about bringing together all of the transactional information that comes into a university every day. Student registers for classes, we hire new faculty, somebody pays a bill, somebody gets a bill. All of that is information that is transactional. But when you make decisions about running an institution, like a college or a university, you need to be able to summarize that to a higher level. And that's what business intelligence analytics is all about.

Elvin Freytes: Okay, cool. Now explain that to me like I'm a three-year-old.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: So instead of looking at a list of 2,500 students individually and the 6,500 classes that they took in the fall enrollment and then looking individually at their gender and their ethnicity and whether they were taking a full-time load or a part-time load, business intelligence analytics will add all of that up so that you can see that you have X number of part-time students that were women and X number of full-time students that were men in the fall. And you can look at that one to two only. So you can look at that year over year, term over term.

Elvin Freytes: Got it. So IPEDS.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: As a matter of fact, I do do IPEDS. It's one of the things that I presented on here at the conference.

Elvin Freytes: No way. That's cool. Tell us about that. That's awesome.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: So IPEDS is a very complicated survey process. Does anybody know what it stands for?

Elvin Freytes: Yes, it stands for... Go for it.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Now I'm not going to be able to do it. It is the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

Elvin Freytes: Bravo, bravo. I'm impressed. Cyndi.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: So, IPEDS is required reporting for most higher education institutions. If you receive any kind of federal financial aid or financial aid from your state, you need to report IPEDS. It's a series of 12 surveys that ask for information about institutional effectiveness. It's looking at your human resources, your fiscal resources. It's also looking at student success.

Antioch is five different campuses. We have a campus in Keene, New Hampshire. We have a campus in Yellow Springs, Ohio. We have campuses in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, California, one in Seattle, Washington. We also have fully online programs and low residency programs. We're spread out. Antioch submits not 12 surveys, but 60 surveys each year. So back in about 2014, we automated our IPEDS processes. And in doing that, it also initiated data governance conversations.

Elvin Freytes: That's fun. Are you familiar with data governance?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Fun times. Well, if you think about it this way, any kind of compliance reporting requires that you have clear, consistent definitions for things like student, full-time, part-time, exactly. Well, clear and consistent and common language, common definitions are foundational to data governance. So in the process of standardizing and automating our IPEDS reporting, I also needed to standardize and clarify those definitions. So that helped us develop our first data glossary, for example.

Elvin Freytes: Wow. Tell us more about the university because you mentioned a little bit more.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Sure. We're a multi-campus, multi-state institution. We offer degree programs at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral level. We also have licensure and certification programs and a broad array of continuing education and professional development offerings as well.

Elvin Freytes: Gotcha. And how long have you been there?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: I've been there for 15 years.

Elvin Freytes: 15 years! Wow. You started when you were 10 years old. That's awesome. And so you're at E-Live and we were talking before this and what number is this that you've been attending E-Live?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: You're not going to get that out of me on air, Elvin.

Elvin Freytes: She won. You remember you started when you were 10.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: I think it's in the neighborhood of 20 or so. The institution I was with prior to Antioch was also an Ellucian customer. I've been coming to these for a while.

Elvin Freytes: So talk real quick, just real quick about the beginning, because you were saying a cool story before we got started about your first time and how it has evolved and talk about that a little bit.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Sure. Well, in the beginning, it was called the Datatel Users Group. It was called DUG. And DUG was held every year in the same hotel, the Marriott Wardman Park I believe it was called in Washington DC. It was a much smaller conference. It was a lot of fun. I'll tell you one story from that. One year after the big client appreciation party, which is always on a Tuesday night, we were all in the lobby hanging out, having a great time full of joy and happiness, and then the power went out in the entire, that whole part of Washington DC. So the hotel staff went around handing out those little glow sticks and some friends of mine who are musicians had their instruments. So we just sat in the lobby and we played music in the dark. It was wonderful.

Elvin Freytes: I love it. Okay, cool. So you're so lucky because you've got to experience three days already. You presented and I'm sure you've been sitting in on a bunch of other sessions. What have you taken away? What are you going to take away and what are you going to go back to campus with? Anything that kind of sticks out?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Sure. Well, look, there's a couple of very specific things that I took away. One is about improving - this is going to be really dorky and nerdy - improving how we can use the campus organizations module to track non-instructional faculty load. So every year faculty are responsible for teaching a certain number of classes. Many organizations, institutions also require that their faculty perform some sort of civic engagement. Right?

Elvin Freytes: Okay.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: So that could be serving on a committee, that could be serving as a chair. That's what you call non-instructional work, but we need to have something to measure that. It's often called a course release. So let's say you're supposed to teach six courses, but because you're chairing our anti-racism task force, you only have to teach five courses. You get that course release. So you can use the campus organizations module and coding to track that non-instructional load for your faculty. Very helpful for the deans and the department chairs.

Elvin Freytes: Absolutely. So that's a big takeaway that you got attending one of the sessions or?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Sure. I was already using it to some degree, but the presentation I went to just took it a step further. I'm very excited to bring that back to the campus.

Elvin Freytes: Yeah, that's awesome. So I'm going to ask this question. I think I know the answer, but why do you keep coming back other than the awesome people and the good times and the amazing guests that they have here? Is there any other reason why you come back?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Yeah, absolutely. I keep coming back because of the people that I connect with, because of the connections with other clients. I mentioned data governance earlier. It's a real passion of mine. I believe that data governance is central to higher education, to any organization in any industry, really. But higher education is a little slow to catch up on that. So both of my presentations at this conference and at the last conference and at the conference before had to do with data governance and data management as a concept and people are hungry for it here. That's one of my takeaways. My session that I did on Monday, capacity was 300 and we had 298 people that were registered and then people stayed and wanted to talk about it. It's a very hot topic. So I'm really hoping that next year at Ellucian, perhaps there can be an entire track full of sessions on data governance.

Elvin Freytes: Yes. And so is AI involved at all in data governance? Is there some type of conversation happening within the artificial intelligence?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: So data governance is about how you govern all of the rest of the data management functions, right? So data quality is a data management function, how you manage the quality of the data that you take in. How do you manage your master and reference data? That's a data management function. Another part of data management function is about data integration and data lineage, data catalogs, metadata. And there's a lot of movement in the data governance and data management world right now to use AI to help develop those catalogs, sort of consume data architecture that already exists and then provide that back to you in a readable, understandable format.

Elvin Freytes: Okay, so we're coming up to time and we had a lot of people lining up because they're here to see somebody. They are here to see - they're not here to listen to us talk are they? I heard there's a guy named William Shatner who's gonna talk soon. What?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Yes.

Elvin Freytes: So that's pretty cool. But I got to ask you though, you have a lot of experience even when you started when you were 10 in higher education. So what does the future of higher education look like to you?

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: So I believe that higher education is - the future of higher education is going to rely on collaboration. Yes. And at the institution level. So Antioch has just formed something called the Coalition for the Common Good with Otterbein University. So that's two separate universities and there's room for additional universities to come in. These are universities that have alignment with our mission, right? We are universities that have offerings that complement each other. So Antioch has undergraduate programs in management, but their graduate management programs were rather small. We have very successful online graduate management programs so we could develop pathways for Otterbein students to move right on into an Antioch graduate program. And I've been talking to people here at the conference where there's consortiums and there's collaboration at the institution level. And I think that's going to be a big part of the future for higher education.

Elvin Freytes: Nice. I love it. Well, there you have it, everyone. This was awesome. Thank you so much. I'm going to try. See if I get it right. Let's have her name is Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald. And she is the University Manager of Business Intelligence Analytics at Antioch University.

Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald: Yes, sir.

Elvin Freytes: Two for two. Well done. Thank you. And with that, everyone, you've just EdUp'd.