One area of UK higher education which is not much talked about is the work that is undertaken working with businesses and the community, whether that be through research, consultancy or training.
The lovely people at HESA collate all the terrific detail of this work through the annual Higher Education Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) survey.
The data and associated visuals produced by the splendid people in Cheltenham are here: Lovely data and visuals. For this post team #VisualisingHE focus on just a couple of aspects.
HE Market Leaders
Firs is Dave’s take on the business and community services provided by HE provider. He looked at which institutions are providing the bulk of activity (and, therefore, the income) in this area, and how it is changing over time.
The interactive visualisation shows the data in quadrants and allows the user to split the data by the type of service and also the type of organisation that the HE provider was working with.
The size of the square is the total income for the selection and the colour provides shows the region of the provider.
The main takeaway from this visualisation:
In all the categories there are only a few HE providers who dominate the area (Oxford for Contract Research, University of Leeds for Facilities and equipment) with the exception of Consultancy which is shared a bit more across the sector.
Engagement with the General Public
The second take on the HE-BCI data is Elena’s interactive visualisation that shows how universities engaged with the community in the 2016/17 academic year in one of 5 categories.
The screenshot above shows details just for free Museum education type of events. Each HEI is plotted in the scatter and is coloured based on the region it belongs to. For consistency, Dave and Elena used the same colours for the regions. T
he scatter plot shows the scope of the HEIs’ activities measured by number of attendees and number of staff days. The totals for the entire sector can be seen just above the scatter.
The main takeaway from this visualisation:
The main insight can be seen when switching between the different types of events: usually universities are clustered quite closely and very few outliers can be seen in any of the categories.
Thank you for reading and we hope you enjoyed exploring our visualisations.
Dave & Elena
VisualisingHE 