Agenda

How refining questions through “iterative interrogation” strengthens understanding, improves data quality, and supports clearer institutional decision-making. A practice that builds trust, uncovers hidden assumptions, and fosters a more effective data culture across higher education.

Join us for a look at how UVU data practice is evolving. We’ll share the vision of UVU data strategy, emerging AI capabilities, cross-division collaboration, accreditation alignment, and myData Hub improvements—focused on learning, iteration, and asking better questions to offer better data to support better decisions.

This session highlights how collaboration with data stewards improves data quality, governance, and decision-making—empowering institutions to use data confidently, responsibly, and strategically.

As generative AI tools become ubiquitous in the workplace, universities face a critical challenge: how to harness AI's transformative potential while protecting sensitive institutional and personal data. This interactive session addresses the hidden risks of "shadow AI", unauthorized consumer tools that may expose FERPA-protected student records, employee information, and proprietary university data, and presents UVU's approach to enabling safe, compliant AI adoption across campus.

Data-driven decisions depend on who can access and understand the data. This session demonstrates practical ways to make reports and visualizations accessible to all decision-makers using standards-based approaches and free tools—without sacrificing clarity, rigor, or design quality. Attendees will leave with concrete strategies, examples, and resources.

Discover how UVU is transforming data quality and accessibility through Azure, Power BI, and upcoming Microsoft capabilities. This session highlights recent system and reporting enhancements, improved governance, and our roadmap toward integrated, self‑service analytics that empowers better, faster institutional decision‑making.

Learn how better prompts unlock better decisions. This session shows how M365 Copilot and Microsoft first‑party agents turn everyday work in Teams, Outlook, and Office apps into faster insights; securely, using your existing permissions. See how Work IQ and analytics connect questions to action, with practical prompting patterns and governance tips.

Getting the details right is an important part of telling a consistent and accurate story. Learn how student affairs has partnered with BIRS and other campus partners to avoid getting lost in the semantics when telling our story.

What if better data could accelerate our progress toward UVU’s Advancement Goals? Institutional Advancement has been quietly transforming how fundraising data is collected, managed, and used—driving clearer insights, stronger collaboration, and smarter decision-making. From adopting modern systems and streamlining processes to strengthening data hygiene and reporting, these improvements are changing how we understand and act on fundraising performance. Join us to see how data transformation is helping turn strategy into impact to successfully fulfill Advancement's mission through fundraising and engagement!

Learn how to take a shared spreadsheet and turn it into a simple Power BI report. This beginner-friendly session covers the basics of building, sharing, and reusing reports—plus practical tips for reducing duplicate dashboards and improving consistency across reports.

We will explore data elements that may seem insignificant when reported to USHE, but can have a big impact on yearly reporting and budget decisions.

Higher education is at a crossroads. We’re facing declining enrollments, shifting demographics, rising costs, and growing expectations for personalized learning and workforce alignment. These challenges aren’t theoretical—they’re here, and they’re accelerating. The question isn’t whether higher ed will change—it’s how. Will we cling to old models, or will we embrace transformation?

A rapidly evolving technical landscape has outpaced regulatory frameworks, creating ethical dilemmas. IRBs must shape guidelines for responsible data collection in AI-driven research. We examine how dataset scale, linkage, and analytic methods challenge anonymization, assess re-identification risks, and position data governance as a shared ethical responsibility in UVU’s research community.

Most AI failures start with bad questions, not bad models. This session shows how the right data and context unlock better answers from AI. Learn how to shape questions, diagnose weak responses, and get reliable results. Tyler has led enterprise AI transformation projects for 12+ organizations, building 50+ AI agents that turn real-world data into scalable, measurable outcomes.

Transform vague questions into clear, actionable insights! In this interactive session, you’ll try your hand at iterative interrogation – a practical technique for refining data requests and uncovering hidden assumptions. Using real higher ed data scenarios, you’ll construct thoughtful follow-up questions that lead to clarity, trust, and better data.

A practical overview of Canvas Analytics and the built-in data features available to faculty. Learn what information Canvas can surface about course activity and student engagement, and how these insights can help you ask better questions and make more informed teaching decisions.

Institutional effectiveness requires translating ambiguity into evidence-based action. In this 45-minute UVU Data Summit session, participants bring a messy unit-level question and learn a practical framework to define outcomes, align metrics, assess data quality, and surface assumptions, risks, and equity impacts, leaving with a draft decision plan and next-step analyses.

This presentation will equip participants with a practical, replicable framework for conducting program reviews. A program review conducted on the Housing and Residence Life Department will serve as a case study, illustrating how to use departmental data and CAS Standards to identify strengths and actionable recommendations.

Learn how leaders and managers are using UVU’s new Budgeting, Analysis & Reporting System in Power BI (Power BARS) for better data access, insights, utilization, and strategic decision-making.

Using examples of USHE dashboards informed by both system analyst and institutional reporter perspectives, this presentation demonstrates how integrating system-level data with institutionally driven reports enables proactive institutional analysis.

Clear, well-constructed course and program learning outcomes are essential to meaningful assessment, curriculum coherence, and accreditation readiness. We developed an analytics suite using natural language processing (expanding to large language models) to evaluate outcome clarity and cognitive complexity. The tools strengthen measurability and instructional usefulness while reducing faculty workload and supporting continuous improvement.

Wrap up the Data Summit with a game of Friendly Feud. Drawing from themes across all sessions, teams will test their data instincts, revisit key insights, and reinforce what we’ve learned—proving that better questions, better data, and better decisions can also be fun.