Dear All
I’m often interested by this type of question/discussion and I feel that as a sector we’re not always clear enough in articulating our needs to HEFCE/HESA. I
think that’s because we don’t often talk about what we do with these outputs, and so we don’t have a collective knowledge. I don’t know how useful it will be in respect of the original question, but I’ll throw out there what we do.
For the HESA and HESES re-creation, we’re largely cutting HEFCE’s outputs out of the loop altogether. We can upload HESA Student xml files into table in our database
and have routines to calculate many of the derived fields (both funding specific and PI related). Using Reporting Services, we can then produce HESES re-creations or other derived data (such as HESA PIs and league table data, though much of this is still theoretical).
This process doesn’t give us any more than we get from HEFCE/HESA, but it does mean we get it much earlier; we produce HESA data each night, so we have all the derived data from the day after the student registers (we still have all the cleansing to do in
due course, of course!).
What we need from HEFCE/HESA to do this is a timely release of their technical documentation; what we find is we’re often using last year’s algorithms on this
year’s data (or writing our own algorithms where necessary).
Where we do want to use data provided in an Excel or CSV format, we use Integration Services to upload the data into our reporting database. We can then report
from there. The current example is the KIS output, which we’ve used to give our departments a preview of their KISs very much as we expect them to look ‘for real’, but several weeks prior to the previews from Unistats. The main problem here, as mentioned below,
was the significant and unannounced change to the structure of the workbooks a couple of weeks ago; although the amount of work this created was only about half a day, the fact that it came without warning was problematic. All-in-all though, I’d highly recommend
investigating using Integration Services and Reporting Services for this kind of thing. Both are probably already included in your institutions’ Microsoft software licensing package, talk to you MI or database people.
Any other thoughts or suggestions will be received with interest (particularly those who are already using/testing some of the new features in Excel 2010) ; I
do occasionally bend the ears of people at HEFCE (usually in a nice way) about how I think things should work and it’s handy to be able to cite a broader consensus when doing so!
I wonder if it would be worth trying to expand on this discussion in a session at a conference somewhere?
Ray
Ray Lashley (Dr.)
Senior Planning Officer
Planning Office
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom
T +44 (0)1206 873222
F +44 (0)1206 874498
From: Academic, financial or space planning in UK universities [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Wells, Jim C
Sent: 26 July 2012 11:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Using HEFCE's HESES re-creation individualised file
Dear All,
I wonder whether colleagues would be willing to share their methods for working with the individualised file from HEFCE’s HESES re-creation?
The HEFCE documentation gives guidance for working with it using Excel, but for the past several years we have found it useful to load it into Access and interrogate it there, including linking it to other data (eg. a course lookup so we
could add course title) and using a number of standard reports.
However, we found that the format of the individualised file from the 2010-11 web facility has changed considerably from previous year, and now has more columns than can be loaded to Access. We consulted our database administrators about
the possibility of loading it to Oracle, but it seems that the recommended maximum number of columns in a table is 255. The HEFCE file has 956.
Any information that you are able to share would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Jim
Jim Wells
Senior Business Analyst
Student Information and Planning (SIP)
Registry
University of Hertfordshire