Project
Institutional Data Use & Implementation Pilot Program​
Description
Our college’s goal is to improve college-wide data literacy for GRC employees. Our project supported this larger goal through investigating and identifying opportunities for shared data training among different employee types and college areas.
Data Foundations
Community College
Washington
Amanda Chin
Librarian
Whitney Boswell
Senior Director of eLearning and the Excellence in Teaching Collaborative
Evidence

Our research question for this project was "what are common work activities at GRC that the Data Action Team could develop training for, and encourage the use of, equity-minded data practice?" To answer this question, we conducted interviews with GRC employees across different employee roles and college operation areas. Questions centered on the daily work activities of the interviewee, as well as their attitudes and understandings of equitable data practice. We identified common themes regarding the kinds of work GRC employees typically do, the opportunities to use data in their work, and the opportunities for professional development training that would increase and support the use of data equitably.​

Goal

Green River College's 2023-2024 academic year goal was to develop a professional development training plan that would increase employees' equity-minded data literacy. Because the college's offices and departments are so varied in scope, this fellowship's goal was to contribute to the larger college plan by identifying effective starting points to develop training.

Lessons Learned

There were three lessons we learned over this fellowship.

  1. Establishing a shared understanding of data (literacy) and workplace-use at the start of the project was vital.​
  2. Having a clear research goal is very helpful.
  3. Having a larger and more diverse fellowship team would have made this project more effective.