OIRA is pleased to respond to requests for information from faculty, staff, administrators, students, and the community. However, it is important to note that requests are prioritized on the basis of how critical requests are to the success of the college’s mission.

All requests must comply with guidelines set forth in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). In general, we do not provide raw data to external requestors.

Here are some steps to follow that will help us provide the data that you need in a timely manner.

Plan ahead.

Service requests typically are processed in the order they are received. Therefore it is critical to submit your request well ahead of when you think you will need the data, and to be as clear as possible in your service request. What may seem on the surface a simple request may actually involve a series of time- consuming steps such as: determining if the data you are requesting has been collected, identifying where it is stored in the database, merging data, outputting the results, and then analyzing results and presenting the data in tables or other formats. Depending on the scope and complexity of the request and the number of requests in process, turnaround times will vary.

Check to see if existing reports can meet your needs.

The Fact Book has a vast amount of information about the college already published. Please see the following link: http://www.austincc.edu/oira/pubs/factbook/

The Information Portal System (TIPS) is interactive, and provides access to data on Course Progression, Developmental Education, Enrollment, Grades, Graduation/Completions, Transfers and Withdrawals. TIPS enables the user to disaggregate results by gender, ethnicity, and other characteristics.

The Information Portal is available here: http://www.austincc.edu/tips/

If you have not previously used TIPS, the TIPS access request form is available here: https://www.austincc.edu/tips/

Provide details regarding your request.

Identify the critical questions you want to answer, specific data elements you need, and the time periods. If you have a prior report that you need updated then please send a copy of the report. If you have a list of students for which you require data, please send a list of the student IDs to the data request coordinator via your ACC Google-email account, after you have completed and submitted your online service request. The more information you provide about what you are trying to do with the data, the more useful the information you receive will be.

If OIRA staff are unable to contact you or obtain a reply to questions regarding the data being requested, your data request will be cancelled, and you will need to resubmit your service request.

Submit your request to OIRA.

Please submit your request online by completing an OIRA Data/Service Request Form. If you have any questions about this form or the process, please contact us.

An OIRA staff member will review your service request for completeness. You will be contacted if additional information is needed before processing the request. After we discuss the request, an OIRA staff member will inform you of the likely timeframe for delivering the requested information. If you wish to modify or add to your request, you must submit a new data request form with the additional information.

Thank you!

We look forward to working with you!