Dashboards

The Office of Assessment recently attended the 2014 AACP Annual Meeting in Grapevine, Texas. There were many interesting sessions related to assessment and its place in pharmacy education. One of the sessions focused on the role of dashboards in organizing data and making it visually appealing. Tableau Desktop was one of the dashboard interfaces discussed at the meeting. This software seems to be an effective means of understanding data and identifying trends especially with large data sets. The raw data from surveys or research projects must be input into Excel before analysis can take place. The Tableau Desktop dashboard displays several views of the data at once. Data can be filtered to highlight specific information depending on the task at hand. Fields can be combined into groups and subsets of data can be separated for a variety of purposes. Statistical analyses like trend analyses, regressions, and correlations can be computed. Dashboards are a good way to help stakeholders become involved in data analysis while presenting the data in a clear format. The Office of Assessment is beginning to discuss the pros and cons of purchasing or creating a dashboard for the Assessment Office. More research needs to be done in order to determine what software would be most appropriate for our needs.