Democratizing On EdTech Data Charts

A fun test of generative AI to augment an IPEDS data chart

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Late last week I shared new 12-month enrollment data broken down by distance education type, including this chart of the Top 25 institutions.

Reader Brian Baute took that chart and did a fun experiment, documented at LinkedIn.

Magic! Or, turning images into spreadsheets and adding additional data with AI.

I was recently reading Phil Hill's analysis of the latest IPEDS data on enrollments, including this great table of the largest online institutions. I wondered where each of those was located (I was very familiar with many of them but less so with others) and whether they were a private or public entity. I uploaded the image to ChatGPT 4.o and asked it,

Please take the data in this image and make a spreadsheet with this data plus the city and state where each institution is located and whether each institution is a public or a private entity.

It generated a CSV file with all the data from the image plus the additional data I requested, which I then uploaded to Google Docs and shared with some colleagues. Magic.

It's a simple use case, but doing that manually would have been an hour or more of work, and ChatGPT made it a two minute task.

That was fascinating, so I tried this same task (create a spreadsheet, add city & state and control) a few ways.

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