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About

RESPONSIBILITIES AND FUNCTIONS

The Office of Institutional Research serves as the source of comprehensive information regarding Hennepin Technical College by collecting, analyzing, and disseminating reliable institutional data in a responsive, timely, and ethical manner. Major responsibilities include:

  • Serving as a clearinghouse for most statistical information about the college;
  • Assisting with planning, developing operational plans, and implementing assessment activities that align with College and departmental mission and goals;
  • Assisting all functional units with the identification of measures to accomplish operational objectives and learning outcomes;
  • Compiling and reporting institutional data in an Annual Report;
  • Coordinating internal survey research;
  • Responding to special requests for data, and
  • Completing requests for data from outside agencies.


SERVICES PROVIDED

The primary purpose of the Office of Institutional Research is to provide HTC administrators, faculty, and students with accurate information in order to facilitate optimal decision-making. Institutional Research also serves as a resource for the compilation of data, including data from sources outside HTC, and possesses the skill to present information in useful formats.

1. Information Clearinghouse

The Office of Institutional Research (IR) serves as a resource for official statistics about HTC. We work continually to gather and organize campus data so that they can be used for internal and external reporting. IR will regularly publish documents such as the Annual Report and assessment reports to meet the information needs of the general public and the College community.

2. Technical support for assessment, survey design, and analysis

IR office provides technical supports and assistance to all functional units in:
The identification of measures to accomplish operational objectives and learning outcomes;
The selection, development or adaptation of assessment/survey instruments; and,
The analysis and interpretation of assessment/survey data and results.

Operational Guidelines on Data Requests and Reporting

Institutional data is a valuable College asset. It contains information regarding the College students, faculty, staff, and resources. In order to protect this valuable asset, and ensure the sharing of it in an accurate and consistent manner, all institutional data are centralized in the Office of Institutional Research. The following are policies/ procedures for reporting and sharing the Institutional Data.

1.      The Office of Institutional Research is responsible for all data reports required by the federal and state government, funding agencies and national publications concerning institutional data.

2.      Departments of the College are required to use the College’s official data posted in the College Annual Report whenever Institutional Data is used. In the case needed data is not available in the Annual Report, please send a request for the data to the IR office.  IR will NOT honor an internal request for data if the data requested are already released in the Annual Report. 

3.      Departments or units of the College are required to submit their self-designed or commercial self-assessment/surveys to IR before administering the surveys.

4.      Ad hoc requests are prioritized by the IR office after approval from the Data Steering Team and may take time to fill. Please give at least 30 days to process a data request.

5.      Date the data if data are used before the official census’ date, which is the 30th day of each semester and the 10th day for summer term.

Code of Ethics

The Office of Institutional Research adheres to those guidelines established in the Code of Ethics established by the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) which was adopted by its membership in 1992.

For the complete version,please go to AIR Website www.airweb.org

Confidentiality

Data which are held in strict confidence includes the following types:

·         Any data which can be personally-identified, whether student, faculty, or staff, must be considered confidential due to federal legislation and/or college policy. Examples of such data are admissions, and family profile information on students.

·         Any data on other colleges or universities provided through means other than public documents.

·         Information which has not been verified by an official source, data or information that has been identified as “for internal distribution only,” and data or information which has been released to IR under the veil of confidentiality.

·         Information which is accessible by the IR staff to be used only for fulfilling the mandates and duties of the office, will not be released either verbally or in written form to individuals outside the office, and will be disposed of properly if containing sensitive data such as social security numbers and salary information. Employees will notify the Director if breaches of confidentiality or security occur or if persons external to IR attempt to solicit information to which they should not have access.