For Department Leaders
What CEDAR can show you, and how to get it
You don’t need to know R to use CEDAR. What you need is someone at your institution who does — an IR analyst, a researcher, a graduate student with data skills — and a data export from your registrar. This page explains what CEDAR can show you and how to make the case for having someone set it up.
The questions CEDAR is built for
These are real questions that come up constantly in academic units. CEDAR can answer all of them from standard enrollment data your institution already has.
Is my department healthy?
A department report gives you enrollment trends over time, credit hour production by instructor type, student demographics and majors, DFW rates by course and instructor, and degree production — in one place, updated each term. Most chairs assemble versions of this by hand from separate reports. CEDAR produces it automatically.
Which sections are at risk this term?
CEDAR can flag sections approaching low enrollment thresholds before the drop deadline — giving schedulers time to merge sections, reach out to students, or make staffing adjustments. This is early warning, not retrospective reporting.
Who’s actually taking our courses?
Not just headcount. Majors, class levels, campus, registration timing, whether students are continuing or new to the department. Knowing that 60% of students in your upper-division course are not your majors changes how you think about that course.
Where do students go after this course?
Which courses do students take next? Who continues in the sequence and who doesn’t? Are there patterns by instructor, term, or student level? This is the kind of question that drives curriculum decisions — and it almost never gets answered.
What does our student-faculty ratio actually look like?
Not the institutional average. Your department’s ratio, broken down by instructor type, across terms. Useful for making the case to deans and for understanding workload distribution honestly.
What CEDAR doesn’t replace
CEDAR is not a student information system. It doesn’t manage registration, advising records, financial aid, or degree audits. It doesn’t replace your IR office — it complements it by handling the department-level questions that IR offices rarely have time for.
Think of it as the analytical layer between your raw data and your decisions. The data already exists. CEDAR helps you ask it questions.
How to get CEDAR at your institution
CEDAR runs as a web dashboard on your institution’s servers, or on a researcher’s laptop for smaller-scale use. You need:
- Standard enrollment data exports — course sections, student enrollments, program data, degree data. Most institutions produce these from Banner or similar systems.
- Someone with basic R skills to install CEDAR, transform your data into the CEDAR format, and run the dashboard. This is a one-time setup plus ongoing updates each term.
- A place to run it — a server, a shared research computing environment, or even a local machine for exploratory use.
The setup guide is in the Developer Documentation. If you have a data-savvy person in your department or IR office, send them there.
Making the case internally
If you’re trying to convince someone to set this up — or trying to explain what you’re asking for — here’s the short version:
CEDAR is free, open-source analytics software that runs on standard enrollment data and produces reports and dashboards designed for department-level questions. It doesn’t require a vendor contract, ongoing license fees, or institutional procurement. Setup takes a few days for someone with R experience. The analyses it produces are reproducible and documented — when you share a finding, you can show how you got there.
The alternative is continuing to ask questions that don’t get answered, or assembling reports by hand from data that was never designed for department-level use.
Read the full case for CEDAR → See the user guide → Get in touch