What Courses Did a Student Take Prior to Changing Programs?

This video focuses on using Tableau to identify which courses a student enrolled in prior to changing academic programs, such as from Arts to Science. Variants on this presentation have been completed at the Edmonton Tableau User Group and Arizona State University Tableau User Group. It focuses on using Tableau relationships and level of detail expressions to better understand which courses were taken prior to transfer.

This presentation was inspired by a university client who was thinking of moving a senior level two-year program to become a direct-entry four-year program. They wanted to know what courses their current students took before joining the program at third year.

In this session we cover:

• What are relationships?
• When and why should you use relationships instead of joins or blends?
• Practical examples of how to use relationships.
• Connecting to a database that looks similar to a common SIS in higher education.
• Creating the calculations necessary to determine when a student was admitted, what program they were admitted to, whether they changed programs, when they changed programs, what program they changed to, and what courses they enrolled in prior to transfer.
• How to build dashboards showing courses students enrolled in prior to transfer.

Special thanks to the team at Plaid for building out Plaid University so we can make the fake data available for download.

Background Presentation

Demo and How To

Tableau Workbook

• Drinkwater, Andrew (2022). Internal Transfers.
• Click to view full size on Tableau Public.

Resources

There are tons of resources available to help you learn Tableau's relationship model. Here's the ones we used to help build this presentation. Know of others that should be added? Send us a note to info [at] plaid.is and we'll add them.

• Clearpeaks. Tableau 2020.2 New Data Model. https://www.clearpeaks.com/tableau-2020-2-new-data-model
• Data Vizardry. Tableau – Understanding Relationships in the New Data Model – Part 1. https://datavizardry.com/2020/06/05/tableau-understanding-relationships-in-the-new-data-model-part-1/
• The Flerlage Twins (2020). Tableau’s New Data Model. https://www.flerlagetwins.com/2020/05/tableau-data-model.html
• Kriebel, A. (2015). DNA Chart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz25C7npzVA
• Lyons, B. (2019). Data Model Enhancements.
• Interworks (2020). Comparing Tableau’s New Relationships to Blends and Joins. https://interworks.com/blog/2020/04/21/comparing-tableaus-new-relationships-blends-joins/
• Tableau (2020):
• Relationships Part 1. https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2020/5/relationships-part-1-meet-new-tableau-data-model
• Relationships Part 2. https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2020/5/relationships-part-2-tips-and-tricks
• Relationships Part 3. https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2020/6/relationships-part-3-asking-questions-across-multiple-related-tables
• Relate Your Data. https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/relate_tables.htm
• Don’t Be Scared of Relationships. https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/datasource_dont_be_scared.htm
• Don’t be Scared of Deeper Relationships. https://help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/datasource_dont_be_scared_deeper.htm
• Tessellation (2020). Tableau’s New Relationships and What They Mean. https://www.tessellationtech.io/understanding-tableau-relationships/

If you're in the Tableau community or just a curious observer, I'd really encourage you to get involved with the Higher Education Tableau User Group. It's a wonderfully supportive community, puts on great events, and has a Slack space with a few thousand higher ed Tableau professionals. This group has helped me solve several issues, and I can't recommend them enough.

More info on the group in general can be found here: https://lnkd.in/g_-UGY9q