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Elevating Academic Administration: A Comprehensive Faculty Dashboard for Tracking Student Evaluations and Research

Musa Azeem, Muhammad Tukhtasunov, Savannah Noblitt, Mitchel Jonker, Kevin Protzman

TL;DR

This paper describes the USC Faculty Dashboard, a senior capstone project addressing fragmented data management in academic administration. It presents an all-in-one web platform built with a React frontend, Flask backend, and MySQL database to centralize uploading and analyzing student evaluations, publications, grants, and expenditures. Key contributions include centralized data collection, percentile analytics, and interactive KDE distribution plots with privacy-preserving views for non-admins. The work demonstrates significant potential to streamline department administration, improve data-driven decision making, and scale to other departments and universities.

Abstract

The USC Faculty Dashboard is a web application designed to revolutionize how department heads, professors, and instructors monitor progress and make decisions, providing a centralized hub for efficient data storage and analysis. Currently, there's a gap in tools tailored for department heads to concisely manage the performance of their department, which our platform aims to fill. The USC Faculty Dashboard offers easy access to upload and view student evaluation and research information, empowering department heads to evaluate the performance of faculty members and seamlessly track their research grants, publications, and expenditures. Furthermore, professors and instructors gain personalized performance analysis tools, with full access to their own data as well as curated access to peer data to assess their relative performance. The source code as well as the link to the deployed application can be found at https://github.com/SCCapstone/K3MS.

Elevating Academic Administration: A Comprehensive Faculty Dashboard for Tracking Student Evaluations and Research

TL;DR

This paper describes the USC Faculty Dashboard, a senior capstone project addressing fragmented data management in academic administration. It presents an all-in-one web platform built with a React frontend, Flask backend, and MySQL database to centralize uploading and analyzing student evaluations, publications, grants, and expenditures. Key contributions include centralized data collection, percentile analytics, and interactive KDE distribution plots with privacy-preserving views for non-admins. The work demonstrates significant potential to streamline department administration, improve data-driven decision making, and scale to other departments and universities.

Abstract

The USC Faculty Dashboard is a web application designed to revolutionize how department heads, professors, and instructors monitor progress and make decisions, providing a centralized hub for efficient data storage and analysis. Currently, there's a gap in tools tailored for department heads to concisely manage the performance of their department, which our platform aims to fill. The USC Faculty Dashboard offers easy access to upload and view student evaluation and research information, empowering department heads to evaluate the performance of faculty members and seamlessly track their research grants, publications, and expenditures. Furthermore, professors and instructors gain personalized performance analysis tools, with full access to their own data as well as curated access to peer data to assess their relative performance. The source code as well as the link to the deployed application can be found at https://github.com/SCCapstone/K3MS.
Paper Structure (34 sections, 13 figures)

This paper contains 34 sections, 13 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. The Platform & What it Solves
  2. Academic Administration Now
  3. Various Sources of Data
  4. Obstacles in Analyzing Data
  5. The Solution: An All-in-One Faculty Dashboard
  6. Centralized Platform for Uploading and Collecting Data
  7. Enabling Efficient and Concise Analysis of Data
  8. Methods
  9. Collaboration
  10. Stages of Development & Timeline
  11. Planning and Preliminary Work
  12. Proof of Concept
  13. Beta Release
  14. Release Candidate 1
  15. 1.0 Release
  16. ...and 19 more sections

Figures (13)

  • Figure 1: A form on our platform where users can report new publications, which are instantly made available to see for the user and their administrator.
  • Figure 2: Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) distribution plot of the average course rating the instructor of every section of a certain course received. This plot is interactive and integrated in the Course Analytics page of our platform. Department chairs are given the option to see this plot for anybody in their department (choose who's average course rating is shown in blue). Other faculty can only see it for themselves.
  • Figure 3: Timeline for the development stages of this project. The following stages correspond to labels in the figure: Planning and Preliminary Work (A), Proof of Concept (B), Beta Release (C), Release Candidate 1 (D), and 1.0 Release (E). The unlabeled region corresponds to winter break between semesters when no development work was done.
  • Figure 4: Dashboard page of our platform. This page shows previews of each major page to provide information at a glance. Links to other pages are found in the collapsible navigation bar on the left side.
  • Figure 5: The Student Evaluations page on our platform. This page shows the average course and instructor ratings received from students for each course a user teaches. As shown in the image, an administrator has the authority to view evaluations for themselves and members of their department (here, department chair Johnny Test views student evaluations for professor Preston Presents.
  • ...and 8 more figures