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Purpose of establishment

  1. History

The main responsibility of

Institutional Research (IR) is to collect and analyze relevant information within the university, and further provide it to school administrators at all levels (such as the president, etc.) as an important reference for improving and innovating administration and teaching decisions.  

In recent years, as the declining birthrate in Taiwan, economic recession, and international competition have made the university's operating environment increasingly difficult, IR has further targeted the needs of operation analytics and met the expectations of stakeholders inside and outside the university for the disclosure of relevant information. Gradually, IR plays an important role in university management.

The institutional research office (IRO ) of NUU was approved by the school affairs meeting in the first semester of the 105 academic year and formally established in August of the 106 academic year. At the beginning, the secretary's office concurrently handled the business; and from the 107 academic year, a director and a division chief were hired and started to operate independently. The effective development of IR requires a variety of cross-disciplinary talents, including information specialists who manage IR database, statistics specialist people who can design questionnaires, collect and analyze data educational specialists who understand the principles of educational principles and assessment and management in higher education. The promotion and implementation of IR work depends on the collaboration between IRO divisions and the assistance of various external units. Further, IRO also needs people who are good at interpersonal relationships and can communicate and coordinate properly with administrative and academic units

  1. Description of current condition

The IRO of our school began to operate independently in August of the 107 academic year, IRO consists of a division of "Data Integration" and another division of "Data Analysis" and is supervised by a director.

Starting from the 109 school year, the provost served concurrently as the IRO director.

The current manpower of the IRO includes a director and two division chiefs each for data integration and data analysis. Each division has a research assistants. The director is also a vice-president of NUU.

The typical operations procedures of the IRO are described as followed. First, the division of data Integration retrieves data from relevant departments via the NUU Information Offices according to a research topics, performs data cleansing and integration. Then, the processed data are forwarded to the division of data analysis, which analyze data, interpret the outcomes, and draw conclusions. Then the conclusion is packaged into a comprehensive report  to the administrators for a reference in decision making. Sometimes, IRO is invited to present IR outcomes at related meetings..

  1. Recent development

IRO is constructing a unified data warehouse for IR analysis, as shown in the figure below. In the first phase, an integrated student database has been constructed to facilitate IR jobs related to student learning and development.

Continue to supply the data of key performance indicators for all colleges, and assist in the evaluation of teaching effectiveness and the performance of enrollment reviews.