A data warehouse methodology and model for student data in higher education

The problem to be investigated in this study focuses on the development of a method to improve the quality of the data contained in the academic student records component of a data warehouse (DW) in a higher education setting. A DW should contain high-quality data and be considered a successful implementation by the stakeholders of the system. Such a system will allow administrators at higher education institutions to be able to make sound decisions for their college or university. A questionnaire was made available to information technology specialists and managerial end-users who worked in higher education institutions. These potential respondents were contacted by e-mail and provided a link to a web-site that allowed them participants to access the questionnaire. The data collected from the questionnaire responses was analyzed by using a chi square analysis and an analysis of variance. DW quality was used as the dependent variable in this study. Whether or not a design methodology was used in the development of the DW or other on-line analytical processing (OLAP) data architecture, the extent of metadata use during the development of the DW or other OLAP data architecture, whether or not data marts were developed before the development of the DW or other OLAP architecture, and the amount of collaboration used in the development of the DW or other OLAP architecture were used as independent variables in this study. The researcher identified positive relationships that existed between quality variables and design constructs. These constructs were then used to build a model for building a DW that could be used for higher education applications. This model focused on the academic student records applications. After analysis of the responses from the questionnaire, it was determined that the use of metadata and end-user involvement had a positive relationship to obtaining high-quality data in a DW. Based on these results a model using a star-schema and a modification of the Zachman Framework was developed. The ultimate goal of the researcher in this study was to build a model for a DW in higher education that can improve decision-making performance of administrators.