DoIT Alerts

Once again, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT), in partnership with the Office of the Provost, invites UMBC faculty and staff to submit analytics proposals for the 2026-27 academic year. Also, this year, a new focus will include proposals that aim to improve administrative efficiency and effectiveness. Regardless, the goal is the same – to use current or past data to inform future interventions or “actionable intelligence” that can solve a current problem or create a new opportunity to achieve a desired outcome.

Grant Overview
Award: $2,000 professional development award, renewable annually, transferred to your department’s PeopleSoft chart string.

Focus Areas

• Student Success and Retention: Projects exploring relationships between activities or learning in one course and outcomes in other courses, particularly critical progression points, low-success courses, or foundational skills.
• Faculty Development and Support: Proposals that leverage institutional data (via REX and Tableau) to inform instructional practices, contributing insights to the LA Community of Practice.

• Administrative Efficiency and Effectiveness: Projects focused on improving administrative efficiency & effectiveness, especially return on investment (ROI) to do so.

Eligibility

• All UMBC faculty (including adjunct faculty, lecturers, and tenure-track faculty) and staff members.

Expectations for Grant Recipients

• Engage actively with the UMBC Analytics Community of Practice (CoP).
• Produce and present a final report or scholarly product (conference presentation, external grant proposal, or publication).

• Consider leveraging results to apply for a Hrabowski Innovation Fund award.

Application Components:
Proposals must include:

1. Brief Abstract: Suitable for publication on UMBC’s website (maximum 200 words).
2. Project Proposal: Clearly outlining objectives, methodology, expected outcomes, and relevance (maximum 3 pages).
3. FERPA training completion certificate (more info)
4. Signed acknowledgement of support: Department Chair or Leader (through DocuSign)

Timeline

• Proposal Deadline: Friday, June 5, 2026
• Notification of Awards: Early July 2026
• Grant Period: July 2026 – June 2027

Support and Resources

• REX Data Warehouse (available to all faculty & staff who’ve completed FERPA training)
• Tableau training and support provided by DoIT
• Access to online, self-paced “Analytics @ UMBC” Blackboard training site.
• Access to prior workshops and resources to inform proposal development.

Please submit proposals here. For proposal guidance, questions, or further information, please contact:

Robert Carpenter
Associate Provost for Analytics & Deputy CIO
bobc@umbc.edu

John Fritz
Associate Vice President, Instructional Technology
fritz@umbc.edu

Tom Penniston
Coordinator of Learning Analytics
penniston@umbc.edu

DoIT is pleased to announce the official launch of the new REX Analytics Portal (REX 2.0), our comprehensive campus reporting portal at rexanalytics.umbc.edu, also accessible at umbc.edu/go/rex20. This portal is powered by Tableau, providing a more dynamic and user-friendly experience for accessing crucial institutional data.

What's New in the REX Analytics Portal?

Importantly, the new portal helps everyone know what’s in the REX data warehouse by showing all reports, even if you don’t have access to them. Also, with the adoption of HelioCampus as our new data warehouse, we have transitioned key institutional reports to the updated REX platform, which offers streamlined access to a collection of new and updated reports, dashboards, and data visualizations in Tableau for authorized users. Main categories include Admissions, Student Records and Enrollment, Financial & Administrative Dashboards, Human Resources, and the Strategic Enrollment Plan reporting. 

In the upper-right corner, click the i icon for an informational overlay on navigating the landing page or the ? icon in the upper-right to request access to reports or get additional help.

Getting Started and Resources

Access the UMBC REX Analytics Portal today to explore the new platform and reports.

• To access the REX Analytics Portal from off-campus (or using the Visitor wireless network on-campus), you will need to be in the VPN.

• The REX Analytics Portal can also be found in the Guide in myUMBC.

• If you have trouble finding a report, in REX, you can look for "_Where are … Reports" in individual folders for links to the reports in the REX Analytics Portal.

• Why & How to Explore Analytics@UMBC – Division of Information Technology 

• How do I self-enroll in the "Analytics at UMBC" training organization?

• Learn more about Analytics at UMBC on our website: analytics.umbc.edu

• Get Help with REX - Submit a Ticket

Future REX Analytics News

We are actively transitioning and developing additional reports. More report folders and categories will be made available throughout 2026. Please keep an eye out for future DoIT announcements regarding new reports, training opportunities, and system enhancements.

Reminder: Authorized faculty, staff, and institutional researchers have varying degrees of access to reports, dependent upon their role at the institution. To request access, click here. Please note that this is a role-based approval process.

Should you have any issues or questions, submit a ticket to the REX Data Analytics team here.

• Attached Inline Image for UMBC REX Analytics Adds New Portal & Hub

Once again, the Provost's Office has provided funding through the Learning Analytics Fellowship program to faculty and staff for the 2025-26 academic year. Details of the new fellows’ proposals are provided below:

Sarah Bass(Chemistry) will reprise (and dive deeper into) a Spring 25 DoIT & FDC panel presentation on her use of NotebookLM to develop "Virtual Prof. Bass," an AI-driven tool that guides students in her CHEM 101 course to proactively engage with course materials. Specifically, she will focus on at-risk students she studied further this summer in Carnegie Mellon’s LearnLab: Compared to students who take the CHEM 101 & 102 sequence in Fall and Spring, “off-track” students who do the opposite tend to underperform on standardized American Chemical Society (ACS) concept inventory exam questions embedded in her unit, midterm, and final exams. In addition to her 24/7 “Virtual Prof Bass,” she will market to and support “Off-track” students by offering focused practice and success strategies during the CHEM 101 common exam time on Friday afternoons from 4-6 p.m. Note: In addition to her LA CoP renewal, Bass’ research and practice are supported by a second year of funding from Digital Promise ChemCore, to support faculty use of the REAL Chem courseware developed by Arizona State University and Carnegie Mellon University. 

Note: Bass will present her work to date in a talk, "Using AI and Analytics to Assess and Supplement Students' Prior Knowledge Needed to Succeed in Large STEM Courses," on Tuesday, October 14, at Noon, co-sponsored by DoIT and the Faculty Development Center (FDC). This will also serve as the first Learning Analytics (La) Community of Practice (CoP) talk for the Fall 2025 semester.

Neha Raikar(Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering) will test whether anonymous grading can reduce bias and student anxiety. The study asks three things: (1) Does hiding names lower real or perceived bias? (2) Does the effect change by assignment type—auto-graded vs. instructor-graded, multiple-choice vs. free-response? (3) Does anonymity help students take risks, stay engaged, and continue in the course? Assignments will be randomly split into two groups: one graded with names, one without. Graders will use the same scoring guides and check that their scores match, and the team will compare results with basic statistics. Short interviews will gauge the time needed, benefits, costs, and any side effects. Students will take brief surveys before and after assessments about fairness and why they feel that way. Reports will share group trends only, not names. The expected result is fairer grading, higher student confidence, and clearer insight into what shapes scores.

Liang Zhu (Mechanical Engineering) is using developed conceptual questions at the start and end of an undergraduate heat transfer course to see where students begin strong, where they struggle, and how their understanding evolves across key course concepts. Keeping the same instructor ensures a consistent view, and early results show noticeable gains. The team will study patterns in the answers to spot common stumbling blocks, judge whether any questions are unclear or too easy, and confirm that the set fairly represents the course. Those insights will drive concrete improvements: clarifying or replacing weak questions, adding timely examples and practice where misconceptions persist, and fine-tuning pacing and emphasis. The question set will be refreshed into a balanced collection that better distinguishes levels of understanding and yields clearer feedback for teaching. The revised questions will be tried in a future offering of the course and accompanied by a brief student survey to gather perceptions and suggestions. Results will be shared with the funding office and at local education venues, align with departmental goals for cost-effective, evidence-based teaching, and inform similar updates in related courses with potential to scale more broadly.

These one-year learning analytics awards are renewable pending receipt of a final report, paper submitted for publication or conference presentation. In addition to use of UMBC’s Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse, and a Tableau “viewer” license, faculty recipients can consult with staff from Analytics and Business Intelligence, Instructional Technology and Institutional Research and Decision support (IRADS). 

For more information about this year’s workshops, speakers and another learning analytics mini-grant call for proposals to be announced in Spring 26, please visit doit.umbc.edu/analytics/community. 

By John Fritz & Tom Penniston

As part of UMBC’s data warehouse migration to HelioCampus, the Data Management Committee’s “Training & Outreach” working group has published a brief (8 min) video orientation on why and how to explore analytics @ UMBC. 

Developed, in part, as a response to the 2006 Middle States Self Study, UMBC’s Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse was designed to help collect, integrate, report on, analyze and (importantly) act on data from a variety of campus systems such as Blackboard, PeopleSoft, and myUMBC. Not surprisingly, the current 2025-26 Middle States Self Study and UMBC 3.0 Strategic Planning initiative will also focus on continuous improvement through curated, campus-wide data to inform decision making.

In addition to the migration to HelioCampus, which constitutes REX 2.0, the orientation video also describes:

• New and (likely) soon-to-be-required training on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to access campus systems like PeopleSoft and REX itself.

• How to find and use free training videos about Tableau’s “viewer” role, which will be used to access predefined (“canned”) reports largely migrated from REX 1.0 that used Microsoft Reporting Services (RS) reports.

• A new “Analytics @ UMBC” Blackboard community where anyone can learn more about REX, “actionable intelligence,” and (eventually) even do some hands-on, self-paced data analysis with dummy data and AI.

• How to get involved with UMBC’s analytics community of practice, including the REX developers’ and users’ groups.

If it's been a while since you've checked out REX, or wonder why and how you should start, please check out the orientation and refresher video or resources above.

The Division of Information Technology (DoIT), in partnership with the Office of the Provost, invites UMBC faculty members to submit proposals for the 2025 Learning Analytics (LA) Mini Grants. These grants aim to support projects that enhance student success and retention through innovative, data-informed instructional practices.

Grant Overview
Award: $2,000 professional development award, renewable annually, transferred to your department’s PeopleSoft chart string.

Focus Areas

• Student Success and Retention: Projects exploring relationships between activities or learning in one course and outcomes in other courses, particularly critical progression points, low-success courses, or foundational skills.
• Faculty Development and Support: Proposals that leverage institutional data (via REX and Tableau) to inform instructional practices, contributing insights to the LA Community of Practice.

Eligibility

• All UMBC faculty and staff members (including adjunct faculty, lecturers, and tenure-track faculty) interested in improving student outcomes using learning analytics are eligible.

Expectations for Grant Recipients

• Engage actively with the UMBC Learning Analytics Community of Practice (LA CoP).
• Produce and present a final report or scholarly product (conference presentation, external grant proposal, or publication).
• Consider leveraging results to apply for the prestigious Hrabowski Innovation Fund award.

Application Components:
Proposals must include:

• Brief Abstract: Suitable for publication on UMBC’s website (maximum 200 words).
• Research Project Proposal: Clearly outlining objectives, methodology, expected outcomes, and relevance (maximum 3 pages).
• Signed acknowledgement of support: Department Chair (through DocuSign)

Timeline

• Proposal Deadline: Friday, June 6, 2025
• Notification of Awards: Early July 2025
• Grant Period: July 2025 – June 2026

Support and Resources

• REX Data Warehouse (available to all faculty)
• Tableau training and support provided by DoIT’s Analytics & Instructional Technology group
• Access to prior workshops and resources to inform proposal development.

Please submit proposals here. For proposal guidance, questions, or further information, please contact:

Robert CarpenterAssociate Provost for Analytics & Deputy CIO
bobc@umbc.edu

John Fritz
Associate Vice President, Instructional Technology
fritz@umbc.edu

Tom Penniston
Coordinator of Learning Analytics
penniston@umbc.edu

• More Information about 2025-26 Learning Analytics Mini Grant Proposals Due 6/6/25