Data Standard: Facility ID Data Issue Documentation

Data-Governance course-component FacilityID Project-Documentation Historical

This article provides historical information regarding the 2021 Data Governance project focused on standardizing the Facility ID coding used across UMS.

Detailed Information

Issue Summary

Facility ID is a data field associated with a class section to indicate the most specific level of detail available (e.g., a building name on a UMS campus, or a high school or other non-university entity). This proposal for Facility ID consistency is one of many standardizations proposed in support of cross-campus enrollment and transparency for initiatives such as the UMS Unified Catalog, as well as increasing ease and accuracy of reporting. This workgroup improved our Facility ID data in the following ways:

Aligned existing Facility ID descriptions across the UMS
Established standard codes, descriptions, and definitions for non-geographic facilities (e.g., Online classes).

November 2021 Proposal Forum

Resources

Forum Notes

Proposal is from the Course Details group, specifically for the Facility ID
- For UMS buildings, Facility ID designates the building name with classroom; for non-UMS buildings (e.g., high schools), the name of the organization; virtual or unknown spaces as also designated as such
These are student facing codes
Working to increase consistency in values and descriptions to create ease of reporting and transparency for students, advisers, and others to understand the details of the courses in which they are enrolling.
Many values that are the same, but have different descriptions
Also need to standardize the creation of new Facility IDs
Facility IDs were aligned for Early College, so some work has been done
New proposed system uses Instruction Modes extensively to create a single, standardized definition/use case for Facility ID descriptions
See slide 5 for more list of proposed distance Facility IDs
Appendix included with proposal has much more detail
The goal is to also eliminate any “TBAs” in the Facility ID so there is something indicated

Comments & Questions

Where is Facility ID in terms of granularity amongst other fields that tell us about the location of a course?
- The Facility ID is the most granular: it gets down to an actual room within buildings.
Does the selection of an instruction mode require a specific Facility ID?
- Ideally, they would follow suit.
- Currently worded such that Instruction Mode must designate a certain Facility ID; should be reworded to align Instruction Modes and Facility IDs without making a requirement.
For Online classes and Distance Synchronous classes, should the Facility ID use the same wording as the Instruction Mode?
- This is a question the workgroup discussed at length. The current proposal does not utilize all the same language, which was a decision made to utilize the language currently most familiar to students. However, reinforcing the Instruction Mode language and definitions by using the same terminology for the Facility IDs as the Instruction Modes could help socialize the new terminology for Instruction Modes, reinforcing a single new set of definitions and codes.

Resources & Research

Strategic Goals Addressed

Unified Accreditation - Unified Course Catalog entries standardization among institutions.
Maine's Economic Recovery Strategy and Declaration of Strategic Priorities to Address Critical State Needs - improving student experience to increase enrollment

Audit Queries

UMS_DG_AUDIT_COURSE_DETAIL
UMS_DTS_FACILITY_TABLE
UMS_DTS_FACILITY_TABLE_DESCR

Audience

System-Wide

0 reviews

Print Article

Updating...