Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) Recreation and Wellness (URecWell) is using data tracking across multiple dashboards to enhance program initiatives.
Kristen LaFleur, the director of Recreation Programs, said the idea for the dashboards was a collaborative effort with the Information Technology Services (ITS) and Institutional Research (IR). FGCU had previously created dashboards to target indicators for performance-based funding metric reporting.
LaFleur spearheads URecWell’s assessment efforts. This first began four years ago when she observed the department’s data was not in a central location, nor was it easy to look at or collect. It became one of her goals to work with ITS to centralize the data and to use the dashboard model IR created to bring the vision to life. The first dashboards didn’t arrive until 2022.
“We use this information to tell our story across campus,” said LaFluer. “The URecWell dashboards capture our impact on academic progress rate of First-Time in College students and graduation rate. They can also help identify students who may be on academic early alert and have yet to engage with us. We all know an engaged student drives student success, so we are beginning early conversations with our Campus Life, and Housing and Residence Life teams to cross-reference our data with theirs to maximize our engagement efforts.”
Data Tracking Details
Currently, FGCU has four dashboards with one in the making and two more to be discussed with ITS and Institutional Research IR The four which are active are:
1. Employee Analysis
This is a breakdown of all student employees who work for URecWell. FGCU captures items like number of employees, race/ethnicity, current class, gender, average months worked, popular major, and GPA versus student body GPA.
2. Cohort Analysis
This is an analysis of all URecWell users with a focus on retention and GPA compared to the student body. The focus here is items like retention from the previous semester, new to URecWell, most frequent major, GPA of students who attend URecWell versus GPA of students who don’t, GPA compared to the number of days a week someone attends, top 10 URecWell utilization per major, and current class.
3. Facility Access
This is a breakdown of all URecWell users with a focus on demographics of who is using which spaces. Captured items include total access, distinct users, top facility, day and hour used, gender, access by residence, age, race/ethnicity, and access by membership type.
4. Transactions
Data tracking here is all equipment transactions throughout all spaces. This includes like top item, day and hour of check out, how many of an item are outstanding, total check outs, distinct user of checked out items, transactions by residence, transactions by age, race/ethnicity, and gender.
“We are currently in the process of creating a dashboard for our Exercise is Medicine program,” added LaFleur. “We also hope this academic year to create two more dashboards to focus on group exercise and intramural participants.”
Dashboards are live 24/7 and are constantly pulling data from Fusion Rec Management Software and Banner, FGCU’s enterprise resource planning system.
Benefits and Tips
LaFleur said the data tracking also aids URecWell’s annual budget hearings with Student Government to showcase how many students are utilizing spaces and gaining from the experiences and opportunities.
“It has benefitted our department as it’s always readily available for our senior director, Suzanne Ries, our associate vice president, Dr. Jennifer Hammat, and the vice president of Student Success and Enrollment Management, Dr. Mitch Cordova, to view the live or historical data,” said LaFleur. “The data can be viewed by semester or multiple semesters. It’s used in our annual reports and to link student engagement to student success.”
For other campus recreation departments considering adding similar data tracking strategies, LaFluer said to brainstorm the concepts or ideas on what you’d want to include on your dashboards before contacting ITS or IR departments.
“Once you have those ideas, it’s easier for those departments to tell you if that’s something they are able to collect data for and how,” said LaFleur. “Also, keep in mind what software you are using and how that works with your university software.”
Want more updates and information on how to track and manage your department’s operations? Sign up for a digital subscription here.
