How UArizona Uses Data to Stay on Top of COVID-19

Campus Technology magazine published a story covering the University's uses of data to address the pandemic. 

This institution has found new uses for data analysis to guide campus leaders, improve user experiences and work with researchers. 

Like many other institutions, the University of Arizona dropped its "phased approach" plan for reintroducing more in-person courses at its Tucson campus. Now, the university is sitting in phase one until the COVID-19 infections and deaths go down in the state. That means students who have returned to campus are adhering to shelter-in-place recommendations. And faculty teaching classes that can be done online are encouraged to instruct that way. The few exceptions tend to be the same courses other colleges and universities are delivering face-to-face: those in lab sciences and healthcare. Even there, of course, students, faculty and staff are sticking with CDC recommendations on cleaning protocols and safety — wearing masks and maintaining physical distances.

But that doesn't mean the university is in a waiting pattern. As Lanita Collette, chief information security officer and deputy CIO at the university, explained in an interview played during .conf20, Splunk's recent customer conference, she and her team are using data to answer questions about online resource usage, improve user experiences and feed into researchers' need for information.

Collette joined the university in February 2017 from Flagstaff-based Northern Arizona University and immediately considered how to bring Splunk onto her new campus in ways that could both "inform [her] security practice" and scale its use "to answer a lot of other problems." Splunk produces software for capturing, indexing, searching, managing and analyzing real-time data, allowing users to do reporting, alerts, dashboards and data visualizations.

Read more on data usage to answer questions, improve Zoom usage, and feed researchers' appetite for data at Campus Technology.