theHUB: the Haabefuld Utility Box.

the Haabefuld¹,² Utility Box (theHUB), a collection of analysis tools composed of functions, scripts, electronic notebooks, and worked examples. theHUB is how we will share these tools with the MSU community to improve the analyses of student outcomes, student success, and survey responses. A standard set of processes and methods along with a defined lexicon enables reproducibility, reduces the time needed to complete analysis-based projects, and allows the quick addition of new methods while encouraging data exploration. Our desire is for theHUB’s functionality to grow over time, and for others at MSU to contribute new features and methods for the MSU community.

Developed and implemented in R – an open-source application with a robust community (on campus and around the world) – theHUB removes the need for a software license while providing access to a myriad of statistical analysis and graphing options. theHUB’s documentation allows anyone to use and understand the tools. Initially, theHUB would contain three Learning Analytics v2.0 projects: the survey analysis package presented at the 2021 Spring Conference, Survey Connections, along with the in Semester Analysis Aiding/Assisting Students and Unified Student Success and Outcomes Analysis Reports applications. Currently, the in Semester Analysis Aiding/Assisting Students and Unified Student Success and Outcomes Analysis Reports applications are on hiatus due to a pivot in theHUB’s focus. We expect theHUB to grow as we add new, yet to be conceived, ideas and analysis methods from the literature, our conversations with others around campus, and conferences and seminars.

Advanced Candidate Evaluation (ACE): Analyze and summarize evaluations of candidates for positions. A standardized interview candidate evaluation instrument containing a collection of questions that can be augmented to include position-specific questions. The result is a set of bespoke reports; an individual report for each candidate along with a comparative executive summary comparing the candidates. The option to include a breakdown of the evaluators’ MAUs and job titles is being developed. NB: All comments are confidential and the search committee never has access to the original Qualtrics data.

Survey Connections: Analyze survey responses to gain a better understanding of the relationships between responses and respondents. Traditionally, survey analysis returns a collection of response counts and comment summaries without considering important and insightful relationships between questions and responses. The Survey Connections package provides workflows for cleaning survey data and performing Likert and Likert-like, multi-response, and comment (text) analyses. The package’s goal is to easily allow the discovery of relationships between responses and the creation of cohorts for further exploration and analysis. See the 2021 Spring Conference presentation demonstrating these abilities.

Installing theHUB

theHUB is only available on GitHub. To install it:

# Install from GitHub:
install.packages("devtools")
remove.packages("theHUB")
install.packages(c("tidyr","tidyselect","tibble","lubridate","dplyr","ggplot2","purrr","stringr","ggrepel","cowplot","rlang","sf","digest","WriteXLS"))
devtools::install_github("emilioxavier/theHUB")

• You will need devtools or remote or another package that allows installation from remote sources, such as GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket, to install theHUB from GitHub.
• We have found that it is beneficial to uninstall (aka remove) the previous theHUB installation before installing an update.
• For some reason you need to ensure the imported packages are installed.

How to use theHUB

library(theHUB)
#> Loading required package: mathjaxr
#> Loading required package: kableExtra

Have a suggestion? Need help? Found a bug?

• Contact Emilio at emilio@msu.edu OR emilio.esposito@gmail.com
• Submit a request or issue via GitHub

Code of conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

License

MIT © Emilio Xavier Esposito

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. The word haabefuld is Danish for hopeful. The aa is really an å, and thus, haabefuld is really håbefuld. The use of aa makes typing (Emilio can never remember the correct ASCII code for the å) and web searches easier. ↩

2. The Haabefuld Utility Box was originally the Hub Utility Box, theHUB for short. The original name – a recursive backronym – was a way to include The Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology where this package’s development was started. Now, theHUB is used to pay homage to the Hub. ↩