The Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching (MacPherson Institute) is a unit at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. With a team of 30-35 individuals with diverse professional backgrounds in areas like consulting and programming, MacPherson plays a vital role in enhancing McMaster’s teaching and, thereby, learning landscape. The MacPherson Institute’s mandate is to support the development of teaching skills and practices across the university. They conduct reviews of how academic programs are instructed and identify areas for improvement. Further, MacPherson completes quality assurance of individual programs to enhance the learning environment for students. They research teaching and learning to help fulfil the needs of both students and teachers at McMaster to help everyone get the most out of their experiences.

Historically, the MacPherson Institute lacked a centralized system for organizing its information, which was not ideal but manageable before the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic forced almost all organizations, including McMaster and MacPherson, to shift to online operations, which exposed significant issues and areas for improvement. Firstly, the organization realized that they had not been effectively using the data they had been collecting. Without a centralized system, making reports became time-consuming and tedious and thus was not always getting addressed. Secondly, the data being collected was inconsistent. Without having any rules regarding which data to collect, staff members would collect what they felt was most important, resulting in the MacPherson Institute having fragments of the whole picture when it came to which events were being held, who had signed up and attended these events and so forth. Lastly, storing, finding and collecting data had become an inefficient process as there were no set of rules set up to guide employees on how they should store data and where. All these challenges made it increasingly difficult for the MacPherson Institute to fulfill its mandate, and thus they looked for some external assistance in solving the issues.

The MacPherson Institute sought out external help to solve these issues and create a modern solution to this problem that would be scalable and keep future flexibility. Creospark pitched a fully customized solution which leveraged technologies already available to the institute, such as their Microsoft licenses, Microsoft Power Apps and Power BI. The proposed solution was a three-stage project which involved creating a database application, a reporting platform through Power BI, and a self-service portal. Implementing a centralized data warehouse, which now serves as the backbone of their new system, providing a single location for ALL the data, ensuring consistency, accessibility and reliability. The Power BI portion of the solution is currently being implemented and involves Creospark building a robust reporting system for MacPherson to transform their data into actionable insights, visualize trends and track progress. This will also allow them to make decisions with the information and analytics to back them up.

Nuno from Creospark showed off a demo of the platform that was created for the MacPherson Institute. The solution emphasizes consistent and reliable data management, focusing on two primary areas:

1. Activity tracking: Previously, tracking attendance and activity data were fragmented as they were recorded by individual facilitators. This led to inconsistencies in how metrics such as attendance were recorded. In this new system, facilitators now schedule activities in advance, including recurring sessions. Attendance data is seamlessly uploaded through a spreadsheet template. Using this approach has led to time savings and uniformity in how data is being collected and stored.
2. Consultation tracking: The MacPherson Institute conducts over 400 consultation appointments annually. These appointments had historically been inconsistently tracked, if at all, and it was hard to create actionable data with only part of the picture. The new system centralizes consultation data—whether scheduled or walk-in. Facilitators now log consultation details in one place, providing valuable insights into consultation metrics. Adding this centralized system for tracking appointments will have further improvements made in the Future such as schedule synchronization for added convenience.

By implementing this tailored solution, the MacPherson Institute has addressed its key operational challenges and established a foundation for sustained growth and efficiency.