Dashboard Application for Data Presentation, Control and Management in Quality Assurance at CoMHS

One of the major functional components of Quality Assurance (QA) in Higher Education is to maintain an overall and comprehensive data repository within the organisation. This data repository contains data related to pedagogy, research, stakeholders, and governance of the higher education institutions (HEIs) and enables them to maintain updated data, data availability, data presentation and data control. The above repository helps HEIs to present a good documentation particularly when the HEIs undergo institutional and programme accreditation tasks. It is imperative that well-made documentation enables the accrediting teams to assess the overall quality of operations within HEIs and make decisions faster. 

Documentation process, under Quality Management System (QMS), is the key to determine the quality aspects of any organisation. The role of QA for documentation, availability of critical data and data control is one of the management requirements and enforced by standards such as ISO 9000. Paper-based quality process can be challenging to maintain because of poor visibility and frequent human intervention and use of technology reduces the amount of work needed, ensures accuracy, and avoids traceability of hard copy of the documents. 

Fig 1 (a) Survey Management System (b) Data Repository for Students, and (c) Infographics, developed at CoMHS using Looker Studio

In recent times, technological solutions prove to be useful and quite productive to achieve maximum flexibility, security, and scalability of datasets to well manage the documentation process in Quality Assurance of higher education. For example, Looker Studio, formerly Google Data Studio, is cloud-based tool for managing the organisational data in terms of operating customizable dashboards and generate informative reports and infographics.

This cloud-based tool makes the accessibility of the data easier and quicker to update and generate reports from anywhere. After realising the benefits of the above online tool, QA office in CoMHS has created dashboard applications for Survey Management System (SMS - to analyse the course teaching survey outcomes and Data Bank (related to Students, Staff/Faculty and Alumni statistics).

Figure 1 illustrates the dashboard interfaces developed at QA office of CoMHS on various domains such as survey management and stakeholders’ statistics. This dashboard tool has integrated features to analyse through year-wise, programme-wise, level-wise, and parameter-wise   data visualization, use the existing data sources (no fresh creation of database) and mixing of data sheets to display the data trends. Data control, customized listing and data management are additional helpful features from management point of view.  

In summary, technological solutions and tools such as Looker studio are helpful to manage QA processes efficiently and effectively. QA office at CoMHS organises activity-based workshops and training sessions on Looker Studio tool for staff and faculty to build applications in their respective areas of operations to achieve the benefits listed above. We express our deeper gratitude to our Vice-Chancellor Dr Ali Saud Al Bimani, who introduced the above tool to build applications across the university in various domains including research publications, teaching, and learning methodology, research data and intellectual patents. We also show our deep respect to Prof Mohammed Al Shafaee, Dean of CoMHS for his encouragement to build college-specific applications and modules.