WGU reduces data curation and governance time from weeks to seconds

WGU endeavors to be the world's most student-centric university. Established in 1997 by 19 U.S. governors, the online, nonprofit, higher education institution  now serves more than 140,000 students nationwide and has more than 300,000 graduates in all 50 states.

Using data to assess each student’s performance, success and educational trajectory is the key to achieving the goal of opportunity for all. However, WGU wants to go further by using data to personalize the learning experience, make it smarter and help deliver better outcomes. For example, the University is analyzing processes and results to personalize learning and guide future students on how best to study to achieve success. 

WGU was established in 1997 to expand access to high-quality, affordable higher education and now serves more than 140,000 students nationwide and has more than 300,000 graduates in all 50 states. 

Formerly, the university had struggled to make the best use of its data. “The problem was we could not get our arms around the data,” said Garth Gehlbach, Head of Data Governance at WGU. “We could not find what we needed or what information we had. When we did find it, it was difficult to understand and we did not know if it was reliable.”

Data was largely confined to departmental silos and there were limited enterprise-wide views. Finding data to create a report and perform business analysis took a long time and often took several iterations to get it right.

Gehlbach knew WGU had some great data assets. They just needed unlocking and to help achieve that, he needed the right solution.

Following its due diligence, WGU decided to partner with Collibra. One main reason is the flexibility of the Collibra platform to adapt to the education environment. WGU has to comply with regulations like FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) which governs access to educational information and records, as well as standard regulations for data like Personally identifiable information (PII). 

Gehlbach also wanted to add customized education-focused attributes and relations to their data. “The flexible data modeling in Collibra means we can add attributes and relationships to data to understand what are the things that will delight students and make the learning experience tremendous.”

“Collibra has helped make great progress in capturing and enriching our metadata,” explained Gehlbach. “Now we can look for data based on a business concept like student retention or student drop rate, and look for and find data related to those concepts. That has been a really big step.”

“Collibra is excellent at enabling WGU to find, understand, curate and trust data, and to do so very quickly,” said Gehlbach “What's more, Collibra can manage information about data-related products, such as metrics, reports, and analytical models, which enables Data Citizens to leverage existing data products and collaborate with colleagues in developing new data sets and products.  

Gehlbach also mentioned that because all the relationships and descriptions can be viewed at a glance in Collibra, users got to answers not just faster but often on their first attempt. Another significant productivity gain is using Collibra to link physical metadata (schemas) and business and governance context to a Universal Logical Data Model, which both simplifies the Data Context Graph and provides an added dimension of precision and power to filtering and searching. With Collibra, for example, we can not only identify PII, but also easily discern between PII that corresponds to an employee versus a prospective student, and apply the right policies.