Amy Homkes-Hayes, Lead Innovation Advocate

@amynhayes

The Academic Reporting Tools (ART 2.0) serve the University of Michigan community by exposing historical academic data including information about courses, instructors, and majors. Faculty champion and founder of ART 2.0, August Evrard, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and the ART 2.0 team in the Office of Academic Innovation ideate, in regular intervals, on what kinds of and in what ways to show relevant data to our community. Of course, we also respond to what our stakeholders ask for. Grade distributions, for example, are something University of Michigan students requested we show for quite some time. Fortunately, we were able to do so. Given the success of recent ART 2.0 improvements including the aforementioned grade distributions, the most common co-majors and minors for undergraduate degrees, and the terms to completion for undergraduate degrees, the ART 2.0 team is eager to show more and, importantly meaningful, data to aid University of Michigan students in making informed academic decisions.

Introducing, Academic Spotlight

In service of meeting this objective ART 2.0 has recently added a new feature called “Academic Spotlight”. The ART 2.0 Academic Spotlight takes unique and significant kinds of University of Michigan data, and puts them into relevant categories and lists for our community. Already, we have six spotlights we are eager for students, faculty, and staff to peruse. These include:  

• The 10 largest undergraduate University of Michigan courses. Interestingly, but not surprisingly given its size, all are offered by the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts.
• All Arthur F. Thurnau faculty. The Thurnau designation is awarded to University of Michigan faculty for outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching. ART 2.0 lists all Thurnau faculty in reverse chronological order, and link to their InstructorInfo pages from this list.
• The 10 fastest growing degrees by percentage increase over the last three years. Some of these degrees include the Bachelor of Information Science and Bachelor of Physics.
• Center for Entrepreneurship courses. We give students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to look at all of the Center for Entrepreneurship courses at a glance, and link each one to their CourseProfile page.
• 100 courses where students reported their desire to take the course was low, but that their increased interest in the subject was high after taking the course. These courses are worth taking a look at, proving that a good course is not always one students had a high desire to take.
• The Wild Card feature. Gain access to 10 courses at random. Given that ART 2.0 contains over 11,000 University of Michigan courses, the wildcard feature is sure to help expose students to courses they may not otherwise know.

The Academic Spotlight feature will continue to expand as the ART 2.0 team responds to the University of Michigan community’s wants and needs in how we smartly and pertinently visualize institutional data. In the meantime take a look at the Academic Spotlight, “roll the dice” in the Wild Card feature, and enjoy getting to know University of Michigan data in new and exciting ways.