Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge describes a new effort from a group of 25 universities across the U.S. to make analytics easier to use on campus: It centers on "data laundry," cleaning and organizing data to make it more accessible.

• What can we do to support more data-based efforts in the higher education space? How will the platform described here improve outcomes for students?

• Here's one possible utility: We can increase college enrollment with better artificial intelligence.

A consortium of 25 universities unveiled a new platform last month that will pull in information from systems across campus to bring richer analytics to college classrooms.

But its leaders have found that getting all the data into a form that professors can actually use presents a messy challenge, requiring what one project leader is calling “data laundry.”

To be clear, this is not data laundering, which would suggest that information is being whitewashed to make it seem more positive. Instead, the group says it is working to do the boring but important work of standardizing and organizing information so that it can be analyzed to help with things like student-retention efforts.

The consortium running the data platform is called Unizin, and so far five campuses in the group are working on this data scrubbing: Indiana University, Ohio State University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But they hope to create a process that others can use, and to push edtech companies to more closely follow standards so that there’s less cleaning work needed.

Read the full article about "data laundry" bringing analytics to college classrooms by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge.