TENNAIR 2026

This is a session description.

Innovation requires more than bold ideas—it requires alignment and accountability. This session highlights JSCC’s six-month, inclusive strategic planning process that intentionally brought diverse voices into tune to define a shared, measurable direction.

The process began with a review and revision of the mission statement, followed by parallel work from five subcommittees focused on Academic Innovation, Financial Vitality, Student Success, Workforce Partnerships, and Institutional Culture. Employees, students, and community partners contributed through a comprehensive survey, ensuring broad engagement and shared ownership.

This collaboration produced six strategic pillars—Relationships, Resources, Reputation, Reach, Relevance, and Results—each supported by a strategic goal and priorities. High-level KPIs were developed for each goal and are reviewed annually to track progress. Unit?level Institutional Effectiveness plans align expected outcomes to the strategic goals and priorities, reinforcing coherence and support across the five-year plan.

Shared values emerged—student-centered care; momentum and growth; reliability and stewardship; grit, culture, and community pride; and opportunity and promise—shaping the vision: JSCC is a catalyst for opportunity where students, partners, and communities see their future through education. Together, these elements formed the plan’s theme, SEE JSCC—Strengthen, Empower, Enhance, drawn from the revised mission.

Participants will gain practical insights into building an inclusive, data-informed strategic planning process that aligns innovation with mission, values, and measurable outcomes.

What if your survey dashboard didn’t just show results, but let users explore, compare, and ask better questions in real time? This presentation is a hands-on guide to building interactive survey visualizations that are reliable and scalable. The first half will focus on the backend infrastructure required to support complex survey data over multiple years, including data modeling, performance considerations, and best practices that keep the system robust as surveys evolve. The second half demonstrates how thoughtful interactive design makes it easy to explore trends across time or questions without overwhelming users. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns and technical strategies for turning static survey outputs into powerful, self-service analytical tools.

This session highlights how the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) is using integrated education and labor market data to support workforce-aligned decision-making across its community colleges and colleges of applied technology.

Presenters will showcase a coordinated suite of system-level tools that link student outcomes, labor market demand, and near–real?time institutional data to inform action at both the system and campus levels. Together, these tools provide a unified approach to understanding workforce outcomes, career pathways, and program alignment.

The session will demonstrate features of Careers Start Here, an interactive platform developed in partnership with the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development that tracks graduate employment rates, earnings, and industries of employment over the past decade. Participants will also explore a job postings and occupational outlook tool that integrates National Labor Exchange postings data with Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics to assess workforce demand, employment growth, credential requirements, and advertised salary trends across Tennessee and neighboring states. In addition, presenters will discuss the system’s emerging Workforce Student Information System (SIS) initiative, which is creating a centralized, standardized data environment to support operational and strategic dashboards aligned with the TBR Analytics and Reporting Platform (TARP).

This session will emphasize how integrated workforce data can be operationalized to improve career advising, guide program investment and review, strengthen credentials of value alignment, and reduce reporting burden for IR/IE staff. Attendees will leave with practical examples of how workforce data can move beyond reporting to support coordinated, data-informed decision-making within their own institutional contexts.

This is a session description.

Approximately 80% of students in Tennessee's community colleges enroll in transfer programs, yet fewer than 30% successfully transfer to a four-year institution. Students who complete transfer degrees but do not go on to earn a bachelor's degree often face weak labor market outcomes, earning less, on average, than peers with other community college credentials. Improving outcomes for these students requires a clearer understanding of their enrollment decisions, program choices, and the institutional factors that shape their paths.

This presentation would share initial findings from TBR's Transfer Student Success project, an ongoing policy research initiative examining enrollment patterns and outcomes across Tennessee's transfer pathways, transfer barriers, and opportunities to improve student supports to improve transfer success. Drawing on TBR end-of-term data, the project explores how students move through, and between, these pathways, and how outcomes differ across programs, institutions, student populations, and geographies.

Attendees will be introduced to key findings from a series of Research Spotlights currently in development. Topics include: how University Parallel (UP) enrollment trends and student populations compare to those in Tennessee Transfer Pathways (TTPs); how often students switch between transfer and applied technical programs, and when those switches tend to occur; how transfer and bachelor's degree attainment rates differ across pathway types; and how students in applied technical programs navigate the leap to four-year institutions, including patterns in credit transferability and bachelor's degree program selection. Together, these spotlights offer a statewide picture of where Tennessee's transfer ecosystem is working well and where there are opportunities to improve current policies and practices.

In March, I gave a TENNAIR workshop showing Claude fix a broken script, recover from missing data, and generate a president's report from a CSV. Those demos were a slice of a larger system. This session shows the rest of it.

Union University does not have a formal IR office. I function as the institutional research and data infrastructure layer alongside our SACSCOC and assessment leadership. Over the past year, I have used AI coding tools to build a dimensional warehouse on top of Colleague (6.5M GL transactions, three dimensions, two facts), a nightly Slate-to-warehouse ETL feeding department chair reports, a weekly intelligence brief delivered to the Provost, and a library of on-prem Informer dashboards spanning enrollment, finance, and academic KPIs. I will walk through what shipped, what failed, and the governance discipline (source plus formula plus falsifier, verification before briefing) that keeps the output trustworthy. Attendees will leave with a realistic picture of what is achievable, what to avoid, and where to start.

As institutional research and data teams scale to meet increasing reporting needs, ensuring visual and analytical consistency becomes important. Without deliberate standardization, reports developed by multiple team members often differ in layout, naming conventions, and design - leading to confusion, misinterpretation, and diminished stakeholder trust. In this presentation we 1) share strategies for centralizing data transformation logic using a dataflow so that all report builders work from a common, governed data layer and 2) present a template-based design framework called SLAB (Scope, Layout, Aesthetics, Build), which provides reusable, standardized dashboard structures applicable across an entire reporting portfolio. Together, these approaches reduce development time, minimize inconsistency, and produce polished data products that stakeholders can more readily interpret and trust. While grounded in Power BI, the concepts are transferable to any BI platform.

This is a session description.

This is a session description.